Emoji belong to the twenty-first century, however sadness is timeless. What is ontologically peculiar about sadness is displacement. Sadness either displaces the individual from the path of everyday life, or the act of displacing the sadness enables the individual to keep moving along that path. There are few opportunities where one can communicate sadness in its “everyday-ness” without having an existential crisis, and why would you want to? It’s sad!

Recently I learned about the designified signifier. It is when the signifier (word / thing / presentation) loses its status as a signifier (presentation) in order to become a “thing” that no longer signifies (presents) anything other than itself – a designified signifier. It can be called the “thing” and we can speak of a “thing’s” “thingliness”, which is how we can call paintings “things”, and speak of the “thingliness” of a painting. We can speak of the “thingliness” of Sinsel’s woven fabric that form skins, and the “embeddedness” of shapes defined by colour that give the illusion of a shallow depth of field. I have a fondness for the “dangliness” of the hollow nuts that are attached to Sinsel’s paintings, and the “wonkiness” of the works themselves. They sit between clarity and intelligibility. Their nuance is that they compel meaning, in ways that paintings didn’t before emoji, although Sinsel’s paintings already did.

If we are looking for the origin of these “things” – then we’ve forgotten that it doesn’t exist, and what we are now looking at is the designified signifier – painted cultural objects as a language of contemporary affects. It is what it is, no more and no less. Our acceptance of this, not unlike emoji, reflects our own intelligibility, and out of context, might render them misunderstood.

Text by Michelle Ussher