Jason Knits

2007 Gift of Art came on Tuesday. Too bad Sven was already on the plane back to Germany when it arrived. He would’ve enjoyed this one. He really loved the Murakami piece. He also thoroughly enjoyed the Murakami show at MOCA. It was lots of fun watching the Kaikai Kiki video piece. The show is a must see if you are in the neighborhood.

Back to the 2007 piece. Salt and pepper anyone?

Oops! This happens when you try shaking the seemingly ordinary shakers.

Here’s a brief introduction to this art piece:

Nina Katchadourian’s work springs from observations of the colloquial and the everyday. She frequently uses misunderstanding or misinterpretations as a starting point, and often applies this approach to looking at the human relationship to the natural. Having once mistaken a bird in a remote jungle for a car alarm, she redesigned the standard six-tone car alarm to use only bird sounds.

This salt shaker merges two familiar objects. It smuggles the tiny spectacle of a snow dome into a domestic context where treating this object in the normal manner (turning it upside down to shake the salt out) results in a sudden small-scale blizzard. Its partner, the pepper shaker, behaves the same way but its particulate matter suggests another kind of phenomenon (pollution, debris, ashes), one more man-made and less pristine. This pair of objects is intended to lie dormant, camouflaged into the landscape of the kitchen counter, until the landscapes they each contain are shaken to life.