The project is based on Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Three Chairs. The work demonstrates a chair in three different ways: a chair made in a factory, a photograph of a chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair”. Kosuth questions if one of the ways of presenting the chair is more valid than the other two ways or if all three ways are equally valid expressions of the chair.
The assignment was to choose a number of personal objects that had meaning to me. I chose the a pair of glasses I have received from my father as a gift, its leather case, and the cloth that came inside the case along with the glasses. I chose the glasses because it is a special present from my father for starting a new life in New York. I also thought that the varying textures of the leather, the glossiness of my plastic glasses, and the soft cloth would have an interesting effect when combined together.
In my abstraction piece, I tried to illustrate the distortion of the lens of my glasses as a round form in the top. The yellow rectangular dots forming a line are the stitches that are embroidered on my leather case. In my text-based piece, I wrote the word “NEW” because my glasses symbolised a new life. I blurred the lines in the background because I wanted to illustrate the function of the glasses, in which it allows the user to see clearly.
