​Prince carves a line from the imagination of what being an adult will be like to its limit, the memory of the missing thing. Let me explain. As youths, we imagine what lies ahead from a deeply imaginary viewpoint—one that ultimately reflects the way we will continue to make sense of life as adults.

As we enter adulthood, we begin to read one another and present ourselves as objects of desire. In a sort of ontological hum, we speak, dress, move as if watched—even in solitude. We imagine what others take us for and know who we are pretending to be at any given time, while often painfully aware that we are not that thing. This oscillation between self-perception and projection turns our heads around and around. We attempt to signify all sorts of qualities, both consciously and unconsciously, navigating imaginary hierarchies of cultural value (and bias).

Object Lessons includes three types of images: First, an imaginary world of relatively young adult women who exist in a sort of paradise lost. These images depict fantasy explicitly, with the understanding that the pretends will be read as given. Second, uncanny, imaginary advertisements that belong in this world and depict what happens when nothing is being sold. These images let you feel the weight that advertisements traditionally work to obscure. And lastly, images where the real is engaged; where the center no longer holds the illusion up.
The combined aim is to depict existence in its distinct forms and communicate first principles: that existence necessitates lack. Prince presents a vision of paradise lost, then slips in moments of existential thresholds we rarely cross, subtly underlining a desire to be rescued from life’s dizzying edges. She does this to highlight the human avoidance of freedom—the discomfort of becoming responsible for one’s self. The work is not moralizing, just clear enough to sting a little.

Paradise lost here is not innocence, but certainty. What replaces it is not clarity, but navigability. These women are not returning to a past—they are travelers of uncertainty, fluent in ambiguity, composed within it.

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