SHOLEH ASGARY

Cenotaph: "an empty tomb or monument erected in honor of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere." The cenotaph becomes an analogy for the empty space between communication, a radical alterity. Less concerned with the individual materiality of objects and more with how they link together as tokens within a larger system, Cenotaph explores how objects represent syntax and how disambiguation can break down language by positing the viewer's faculties (both individual and communal) as the syntax, encouraging communication on a perceptual level. Painting, photography, light, projection, and sound create sculpted environments that are lit much like an object to be photographed--yet leave the mechanical trace of the camera to the viewer's stance. 

"When you look into the eye of a bird, and you are standing in front of a million years of history, and it's looking back at you, but you can't comprehend what it's seeing. You are a witness to it but somehow not a participant of the same world." - Michael Mersereau on Cenotaph