Rosie Jarman | Assignment 1 - Still Life with Birkenstock as Art Object

I work in the registration department of the BYU Museum of Art and a huge part of our job is conducting condition reports where we carefully examine art objects for flaws and markings. For this project, I decided to turn the critical eye of a registrar onto an everyday, very flawed object; a Birkenstock. I chose this particular shoe because of its definitive and iconic design, using the context of a condition report to draw attention to the fact that many everyday objects have been as carefully designed and crafted as any painting or sculpture in the museum. Furthermore, by choosing a Birkenstock in particular, I wanted to explore the fact that it's a product whose popularity rose and fell and is rising again. Much like styles in art, the style of a shoe is enormously dependent on the taste of the age in which it was created and therefore, both works of art and shoe styles are susceptible to going in and out of fashion.

I designed my own condition report sheet, took the picture of the shoe for the sheet, and took the polaroid attached to the clipboard (as polaroids of works are often included with their paperwork) all in the style of a professional condition report and art object file. I then composed, shot, and edited the "still life" to include a few additional tools of the registration trade like clipboards, folders, and pencils. I adjusted the image to have a dusty quality in tune with the golden browns of the objects because it reflects the academic and historical qualities of the registration department.