Zeugma

You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.  Groucho Marx, Duck Soup.

Zeugma is a figure that folds two or more different senses of a word together.  In the folding there is a moment of reverb and revelation: the taxi becomes a state of mind and the huff is solidified into a mode of transport, then compressed into a period of time.

In this collaboration between Jason Dungan and Dustin Ericksen, a fold is constructed in the Photo Centre in Hackney.  It’s the kind of photo shop to be found all over the world, developing holiday snaps, producing passport photos and studio portraits as well as framing photographs and making photocopies.  It’s a dense world of image making; the site a vernacular architecture of functionality and economy.

The duo have slipped in between these layers of function.  They are present but hands off, asking the owner of the shop to take photographs of various elements of the architecture and fittings, then selecting some of these images to be printed out, pinned up or laid out, subsumed back into the premises and re-photographed.  The project is self-reflexive, but rather than a regressive loop chasing it’s own tail, the result is a productive folding of one language over another in order to expose something in the oscillation between.