JESSICA SHOPS

On my recent trip to Paris, I fell into an outdoor flea-market. The collections, the objects, the people, the colors, the age, the design and the cobblestoned street all played a role in creating the perfect concoction...the remedy to my depleted soul, a soul deprived of trinket shopping. My first purchase was an antique horse and rider with the poise of David's, Napoleon Bonaparte.

I purchased this for my partner Sam as he too enjoys trinkets. A few blocks down, I spotted a brightly colored seahorse sculpture. With tunnel vision and jaguar stealth I reached the desired object, for which I still feel a great amount of affection but gave to my sister as a birthday present. Truthfully, she is more keen on sea themed decor, but since living in the desert, I am drawn to it myself. To be clear, there is something fabulously tacky about the sea horse creation but in the context of the French flea market and then later resting on my piano in Texas, I only found delight in its awkward form, material, color and content. 

This morning, Marfa Public Radio's Talk at Ten aired an interview with local artist turned gallerist, Sam Schonzeit, who is presenting a lecture by PHD student Josh T. Franco. Franco's dissertation investigates a particularly interesting juxtaposition that is the co-presence of minimalism and vernacular aesthetics in Marfa, an aesthetic Franco calls Rasquachismo in Spanish, loosely translated as tackiness. Franco explicates that Rasquache may be observed in the yards of locals--cluttered with decades of sentiment, accented with brightly colored flower beds and most likely completed with the iconography of Santa Maria.

Once a tourist, I remember celebrating the stark contrast of high and low here (picture above taken in 2010). In a less obvious way, Mirth flirts with the concept of high and low. Our aesthetic highlights the beauty of objects, but our objects are designed for utility, the ordinary and the everyday. On a mad shopping spree, I decided to purchase a few of my favorite things from Mirth.

Washi tapes, a turkish towel, a japanese body scrubber, a matching scissor and letter opening set, two wine glasses and the perfect pencil sharpner. I have used at least one of these objects everyday since. They are not tacky by any means but they do possess a sort of dual nature like Marfa.

-Jessica for Mirth