"JOSEPH'S", 2026
Mix-media sculptures
 

"The part my father habitually keeps for himself — the lesser part — so that his family gets the best."
The chewy heel of the bread. The stringy center of the mango after the flesh is cut away. The fish tail, still whole, at the end of dinner. "Joseph's" takes its name from my father, Joseph.

Borrowing the language of commercial products, the series transforms the "leftovers" and "defective goods" he quietly reserves for himself, into second-order commodities: objects to be displayed and admired. Made to resemble the products you'd find at shops, the unspoken, submerged, incidental emotional labor inside a household is displayed, and given form. In their original setting these things were never singled out for attention.

I translate this private, daily, repeating labor into the public language of consumer society.

What emerges is a third kind of value: one the market cannot quantify or mass-produce, yet which circulates, real, inside the family.

The series title adopts the logic of brand naming — yet "Joseph" is also a stand-in — for the one who quietly keeps the lesser part for you, and is never spoken of. 
 

The real product this "brand" makes is not the object itself, but the meaning naturally manufactured on top of the object.