Ancient Artifacts by Brad Tinmouth consists of (at least according to what’s viewable on his own personal website, anyway) a series of four product-shot style photographs depicting down-market kitsch sculptures of, respectively (and vulgarly), a “Pharaoh,” a “Buddha,” a “Cat Goddess,” and a “Krishna” over each of which the artist has applied a layer of clear resin.
Now, in each case, this layer of clear resin—it should be said—“spills out” beyond the bottom edges of the object, thus creating, not just a synthetic “sheen” to the object’s surface, but an expanded surface area to the object’s base composed of the dried resin, as well.
That is to say that due to the artist’s ejaculatory marking of his own objects here, one views both:
1. Mass-produced objects which are the synthetic versions of once-unique objects (appropriated kitsch gods).
2. As well as a series of unique objects in their own right (the serial mutations of appropriated kitsch gods).
Each work’s totemic power resides here, then, not in either (1.) nor in (2.), but rather in the oscillation between (1.) and (2.) from original to version to original to version and back again.
(Or one could say that the work’s totemic power resides here not in the representation of deities [or of a given deity], but rather in the process of re-production itself–as if it were a deity.)
This sense is further extended when one considers the fact that these unique versions of technologically re-produced objects based on unique objects are themselves carefully staged digital reproductions (which, in turn, are then further re-produced when framed as contemporary art).
Finally, to reiterate, the power here is not in any particular state of production but in the oscillation between states of production, in the broader picture the work affords of all the chains of original versions of versions of originals tangling with versions of original versions of original versions of originals which were, most likely themselves, versions of other versions of original versions of originals (and on and on and on and on and on).