Auction Core as an Ethos and an Aesthetic bleeds through a lot of work, especially all of mine at Remilia Collective. Auction Core can be described as a modern practice heavily related to the Found Photography tradition of elevating “non-art” or “anonymous” photography to the level of Art. Auction Core finds its Artistic raw materials in the documentation of someone’s collection, often at the time of sale.

Sites and Collections of note to my specific usage of Auction Core are: Yahoo! Japan Auctions, Mandarake and Rakuten for Manga, Figures, Sportswear and 981.jp in Nagano or Hokkaido and Zillow in Arizona for Land and Homes.

The Moment of Sale reflects a specific point in someone’s relation to the collection, a point whereby their relation to the object is as mature as it will ever be, the apex of their familiarity. These conditions produce photographic results that range from the quick-capture of an object by an outsider, for whom the product is a fleeting moment or a final loving documentation of a cherished item by a personal collector. Both are very beautiful to me, and can be understood as two enjoyments of the same flower driven past at speed or grown from a seed.

Auction Core also defines a curational sensibility when zoomed out; looking at the rough scattershot selection of auctions when searching and browsing via machine translation, you often get a selection that consists of a few seemingly unrelated elements. 

This curational spirit was what was explored in Bonkler. The one shown here as example features, A Beauty:Beast runway Soundtrack, Fod Korp Kaomoji Face. Runescape Bronze Armor, WoW Staff of Jordan, Harajuku Stickered Flip Phone, Twitter Emoji Swirling Star and El Nast Maplestory background. These objects were pulled together from various peoples personal “collections” and in a way that is both shocking and coherent, Bonkler is used here as the conceptual element of Auction Core itself. Auction Core has been very useful to me in this way. I can include images in my work that I have carried with me forever, or that I only just found today, and both are canonized and beautified equally.