Thomas Rousset

This guy is a weirdo. To me, anyway. I saw his photo on the opening of the conscientious site and I thought it was quite bizarre, and it is. The descriptions that couple each of his bodies of work are somewhat ridiculous. From what I got, he's basically trying to create a timeless scene. But how do you do this with modern materials? How can you create a timeless scene. Through looking all his photos on his site, they don't appear timeless to me. I do not think that time was overly apparent, but it was also not hidden. I would not have guessed that these were to be interpreted that way. By reading the descriptions it gave me more context to work through. I find his non-defined work just as interesting as when he couples them with a description of the supposed meaning behind them. Trying to create a dreamlike/timeless world is cool and all, but what could he be doing besides this?

I guess right now I am just frustrated with descriptions and labels constantly being placed onto...well everything. Would a person know that what they used as a bar of soap was actually never a bar of soap, but they used it in that context solely because it was labeled as soap? Will something that is actually constructed of timed material potentially ever really timeless? If we need to label our work, doesn't that limit our potential? I guess my thoughts are that if a bar of soap is labeled as body soap, can it still have the potential to become facial cleanser or does it have to always be body soap? In the prison a number essentially replaces the human. The human becomes something watched over, "Is 337 missing?" When a person is a number, who are they really? More importantly who can they be?

Soap will always be soap, unless it is labeled otherwise. Same with photography. If photos are constantly related to a description and justification, that's all it becomes. Our work should never have to be justified by us (the artist). Just as we can't tell people in the gallery that they are looking at a painting wrong, we cannot follow our work in a similar fashion. I know that I speak/write about this too much, but even if our work is bizarre, should we tell why?

I've done some pretty bizarre work myself. But when people asked me the meaning of them, I could not even establish a logical thought. It was like a wonderful collision of craziness, suppressed feeling emotion, and thoughts all meeting in one place. That's what the photo becomes, a meeting place of labeled things. I especially need to keep in mind that people attach labels to nearly everything and what is shown in the frame will always be interpreted and related.

So even horse on treadmill in water still seems a bit too much tied to the discription of timeless.