...a cigar is just...

 

 

We must take pains to ensure that our situations, our actions and our lives have sense, and this precisely because they are finite and in peril of meaninglessness. Without this finiteness, without the possibility of a loss of meaning, no meaning would be meaningful.

 

 

This work is based on the game where an image stands in for a word, a constructed puzzle: that of the rebus. A rebus is defined as a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound. A rebus is also a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols. This work is, furthermore, based on the Greek principle put forth by Epicharmus; that of the acrostic. In the puzzle of the acrostic, a composition is constructed when a set of letters (as the initial letters of the words) taken in order form a phrase. In this work, the acrostic reads: ....a cigar is just... Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. In the psychological sense, not every object is a parallel stand-in for another object. As we know, Freud smoked cigars habitually as a means to work. But, he denied a psychological underpinning to the actual cigar.

 

An image is just an image. However, the images in this series are as clear as they are unclear. These works are photographs of illustrations; blurred images of anonymous drawings taken from a dictionary that were intended to demonstrate meaning. In a historical sense, words are defined by what they have meant (or signified) in the past. Ultimately, these images ask if meaning can be specified in a particular image, or at a particular moment in history. While the acrostic ...a cigar is just... is clearly defined in this body of work, the meaning of the work remains psychologically and semiologically elusive, as well.

 

Calvin Phelps received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2003 and his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He has been in the LA Freewaves Biennial of New Media showing at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA; and the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. He’s also shown at the Sandberg Instituut & Nederlands instituut voor mediakunst Montevideo, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and HotHouse Center for International Performance & Exhibition, Chicago, IL.

 

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