Invocation-Evocation

The lighting of the support mechanism marks our scene as a stage; that the stage is empty at time of photography makes it no less of a drama, because a drama is not established by a content - a drama is established by a set of embellishments. In the absence of its jewellery, the mannequin is inverted. Every night it is stripped it of its bodily decor; no longer the carrier of precious artifacts, it is rendered into armour, breastplate, shell. We are no longer concerned with what it holds up, but rather what it guards or conceals, metaphorically or metaphysically.

Though it happens every night, the removal of the jewels is not precisely a ritual - rituals are inward and full of signification, while the removal is obvious and pragmatic. To leave the display lit, however, is not pragmatic, it is performative. Its purpose is to signal the emptying of the stage and as such to haunt the overnight dead space with life-drama. It is meant to compel us into the twin actions of nondisruption ('nothing to steal here!') and tantalized wonder... but in the absence of the object of desire, it exposes the mechanics of how that desire is constructed.