Me, Myself and I Master’s Thesis: The Ellipsis and its Negation in Self-Narrative

Me, Myself and I

At noon one day, after getting as far away as I could from my [second] lycée, I had lunch with a panhandler. He had one of those big wooden boxes that play music when you turn a crank handle. I think they’re called barrel organs. I stood nearby, smoking a cigarette, he asked me for one, we chatted. And then he began to play. Classical music, simple notes, the early springtime sun beaming down on us. It was bucolic, beyond time. People smiled. And gave money. Both children and their parents were amused; it makes us nostalgic for a time we’ve never known.

After chatting for a while, he rather proudly confessed his secret: there’s nothing in his box. He opened it from the back to show me. There was just a portable CD player. The crank candle wasn’t cranking anything. He’d cobbled together the whole thing out of parts he found at the dump.

It was nothing but a sleight of hand— marketing. 

[…]

Me, Myself and I, the most recent project by Andy Eychenne, a graduate student in museum studies and visual art practices, explores the many ways in which the ellipsis can be appropriated as a narrative device in the context of self-narrative. How does the ellipsis manifest itself when we tell stories—to ourselves or to others—and how can we manage this phenomenon as a narrative tool to reappropriate our personal narrative?

This exhibition attempts to materially and conceptually translate the elliptical process, that is, what happens in the margins, in the space between the frames.

-Andy Eychenne