wish you were here (crown)

Wish You Were Here is a set of fine art prints picturing figures and regalia worked in gold leaf and lacquer: a crown, a policeman, each isolated against a bare ground like a souvenir or a votive card. The postcard formula carries an absence at its centre. To write “wish you were here” is to address someone who was not there, who missed the thing worth witnessing. What they missed, here, is whatever the crown and the policeman stand for: authority, prestige, the apparatus of power, held out as a keepsake to a recipient who remains outside the frame.

Part of the Familiar Spirits series, presented online on Artsy by BBA Gallery, Berlin, 2021.