Everything is Found Wanting

The same sentence repeats again and again. “Everything is Found Wanting” suggests both the world’s inadequacy or incompleteness, and a sense of longing when “wanting” is read as a verb. Its repetition attempts to enact its own meaning. As the phrase becomes an automated gesture, it begins to lose semantic weight. Yet this very automation and loss reinforces the fallibility the phrase points to. In that sense, the phrase functions through its own failure.

I also hope the form of the text, appearing as if shaped in liquid plastic, echos the kinds of gestures associated with domestic, often feminized labor in the kitchen. Ideally, it becomes equal parts cake icing and non-aesthetic, low-tech conceptual art (the latter a terrain historically dominated by men).