Tassels

Tassels — Atarah Atkinson, 2023–2025
Housed in an antique wooden frame brought from Rome, its original glass still intact, this photograph of a silk curtain and tassels — weathered, sumptuous, quietly decaying — sits within ornamentation that mirrors its subject entirely. The frame and the image are in conversation: both elaborate, both aged, both testaments to the human impulse to create beauty that serves no practical purpose whatsoever.
That impulse is what the piece is really about. The tassels, the carved scrollwork, the deep red velvet — these are the gestures of a civilization at its most confident, devoting skill and care to pure aesthetic pleasure. Time has worn them without diminishing them. If anything, the weathering only deepens the question the piece asks: what does it mean that we keep making beautiful things, even knowing they won't last?