There is nothing original about this one-of-a-kind piece. It is reminiscent of many other works that deal with authenticity though the subject of the certificate of authenticity, including Canadian artist Max Dean’s Souvenir - Overcome Wall Piece and Portuguese artist Fernando Aguiar’s limited edition print series Certificate of Authenticity.

The vitrine and certificate of authenticity make up Seeking Validation. Housed safely within the vitrine, the certificate attests to the authenticity of the whole project, itself included. In return, the vitrine shelters and broadcasts this proclamation of authenticity, thus re-enforcing an insular relationship that resists external influence.

The patina of whiteness and neutrality are employed to mirror the institutional aesthetic. Upon closer inspection, however, the box reveals its construction. One sees nail holes on the sides, an unfinished underside, mounting hardware; what at first seems flawless and immutable is revealed to be a construction, malleable and man-made.

The work comes about as an embodied acknowledgement (making as knowing) of the bind between authenticity and the institution. Seeking Validation is an homage to bureaucracy and regimented-ness as cultural expression – a standard that I both create and am created by.

Preoccupations with authenticity and originality are the outcomes of Enlightenment thinking, which exists contemporarily in re-formed circumstances. Marx says of this historical residue, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living.”[1] Enlightenment values are an immoveable mountain that each must bear.

Seeking Validation is a project of “learning to live with contradictory instructions”. [2] It is not a critique of the institution, nor does it seek to un-inscribe the phenomenon it presents. Rather, the work uses the language of the academy to play with, not solve, the bedfellow relationship between institution and validity.

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[1] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” The Karl Marx Library, edited by Saul Kussiel Padover, McGraw-Hill, 1973.

[2] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Introduction”, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, First Harvard University Press, 2013.