Image: Miele, Bunny. “Bunny Miele on Instagram: ‘from the Time i Drew a Ouija Board/Made It into a Solar Plate/Printed It onto an Old Photo with a Letterpress 🌞”.” Instagram, 2018, [https://www.instagram.com/p/BIAmlAEhQQC/]

On Ouija on Vintage on Solar Plate

Aria Jung Kim

Do you think that having the picture of the ones who’ve passed away and then just sticking it on there would make this any easier? Half their faces are covered with numbers now. Hello Mr. Four, is Mrs. Five giving you any problems, you seem to be giving her quite a look. You know nothing of these people yet you put numbers and labels on them anyway to add to the antiqueness, the sense of something slightly awry, into the image. Then again, that’s what happens all the time – people to numbers, to labels, to data point 1 through 23448, with a database schema with distinct IDs, race, age, income, location. These people mean everything but nothing. Their figures, their sepia toned faces and long white dresses that must itch their legs, that’s what matters. The faces that are hard to see in detail because of the shading, how the shadows are black and you get just enough to recognize humanness or something approaching humanness, that’s what matters. To add something to a Ouija board, a certain English charm that only comes with old photographs, baby sleeping meds laced with opium, white powder that covers the scars of smallpox, that’s what matters.

Made perfect for channeling, made perfect for pranking the skeptics who ramble about the wonders of technology, scoff at occult pages still running and gaining in popularity, but jump at the flickering lights while being told a mediocre horror story. Made perfect for the wannabes, who started seeing pictures of altars and crystals and smudging white sage, smoke billowing around a blonde girl with “natural curls” and a dried flower crown with a dash of black lipstick. Made perfect for the people with empty wallets that still need something more, fingers reaching for the last credit card in hopes that maybe this urge will be the last, that they’ll get something from it once the entire room, once the entire apartment looks enough like the aesthetic they want to achieve and embody fully, permanently, as though they’ve never been anything else.

That’ll be $32.45.

Ekphrastic Approaches: 8 (Of the Artist) and a bit of 10 (Of Yourself) through Aurel’s perspective (the protagonist for the final project)