Tickety-Boo!, P 58 & 59, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 58 & 59, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

Text by Emika Suzuki

Tickety-boo! Everything is fine. Unless of course, when it isn't — which is just as possible. With the same wackiness, Charle H. Traub montages sequentially vaguely matching photographs taken with his smartphone, arranged in a labyrinthine association of congruent imageries. We pick up patterns from each series and see the similarities, yet we realise that each set of comparison treats similarity differently, and so the images are not so similar after all; it is saying one thing, but at the same time saying another, just like saying "tickety-boo" — a British colloquialism which means "everything is fine", though tinged with a latent uncertainty. Aptly titled, these compilations of images evoke in us the ambiguity and deliriousness of existence.

Tickety-Boo!, P 188 & 189, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 188 & 189, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

In the first series of the book, we see photographs concerning sight, vision, eyes — a camera graffitied on a wall, a woman's gaze through the computer screen, a window through which you look outside, a pareidolic eye on the bark of a tree. It is a bewildering network of similitudes overlapping and crisscrossing each other, reminiscent of a Wittgensteinian family resemblance: there are no exact boundaries delineating these ideas; the images have common features, but no one feature is common to all of them. The dialectical soliloquy in our heads would then bring up the question: why is it that we obsess ourselves over generality, in vain, defining laws and analysing essences, as if rebelling against the very force of nature and reality, of ambiguity?

Tickety-Boo!, P 18 & 19, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 18 & 19, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

Traub employs a stream-of-consciousness method when taking the photographs, utilising the readiness for capturing fleeting instants made possible by smartphones. The result is an anarchic, turbulent sea of ideas which at times concur, and at other times conflict — even though thought flows in a spatio-temporal sequence, just as a body of water does — it is irrational, incoherent, incongruent. In this way, Traub's methodology and photography mirror the very nature of reality itself — both of our minds and ideas, and of the materiality that exists outside: reality itself is contradictory and discordant. Traub embraces this, and through his work, encourages the viewers to do the same.

Tickety-Boo!, P 144 & 145, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 144 & 145, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

From linguistics to psychology, from images to matter, ambiguity is ubiquitous. This is not formulated from a pompous platitude, but as Traub effectively shows in the book, it is a fact of existence. With the breakthroughs of quantum mechanics, we came to know that at the most fundamental level, reality is entangled in a probabilistic mystery. The blurriness of being is not in our mind, but in nature. The world, unfathomable and aleatory, is forged out of enigmatic synchronicities. Traub's photography and playful systemisation of the photographs not only bring us to a reflection on the worldly matters of human existence, but also lead to such metaphysical musings.

Tickety-Boo!, P 92 & 93, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 92 & 93, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

With that said, something about Tickety-Boo strikes the reader as truly human. It deals with eclectic themes, ranging from identity to art, urbanity to religiosity — all that exists in relation to humanity. The juxtapositions are always clever and whimsical, and, at times humorous. One series of photographs relates to spirituality and religion: we first see places of worship, then, suddenly, a lavatory stall, that now looks like an altar of sorts. A painting of an aristocratic muse, before showing a contemporary doppelgänger. The tone, too, changes — from a car labelled "powered by Jesus", to the exquisite ceiling of a church and the dawn breaking the darkness, we can expect anything from childlike puns, to the ecstatic reverence of sublime beauty.

Tickety-Boo!, P 20 & 21, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist — *Tickety-Boo!*, P 20 & 21, 2021 © Charles H. Traub, Courtesy of the artist

Everything is fine, though it might not be — but this too, is fine — or maybe not. We can never know. If we were to remove the deceptive lenses that we see the world through, we find that the world itself is blurry. Traub encourages us to give in to the artist in us, rejoicing in the strange beauty of the uncertainty and vagueness of reality — instead of holding it in apprehension — it is how we can come to appreciate the world and its events as is. Tickety-Boo, though suffused with jocular witticisms and often elicits an involuntary chuckle from the reader, is a thoughtful exploration of the mystifying conditions of our existence.