medium: canvas, thread
"All the News That’s Fit to Print"…(The New York Times)
All the News... is motivated by the loss of currency in images due to the rapid distribution and replacement in contemporary society. Feeling increasingly anxious about the intense amounts of information available at any given moment, I began to also notice a lack of response to disturbing and violent photographs. There was little difference in the reaction I had to an image of a bombed village versus an advertisement for cellular phone service. I developed a project in which the process of making attempted infuse meaning back into these images (for myself) while also creating a final product that spoke to the apathy of imagery I was experiencing, and felt that I would continue to experience. The newspaper was a fitting starting point- it has a history demonstrating the shift from text-based to image-based methods of telling stories. In addition, newspapers have an established order of distributing, discarding, and replacing informational images. I chose the front page of the New York Times because within the past few decades they have increased their number of color photographs in order to compete in the business of providing "news". This speaks to the simultaneous rise and fall in the currency of images; on the one hand, the currency has risen because there is a push to use more images to get attention and sell products/ideas. On the other hand, the currency of images has fallen because often the response to a surplus of images is eventual apathy.
Using the size and shape of the front page as a template, I created additional parameters. The first newspaper I embroidered was purchased on a random date (November 28, 2005). When I finished embroidering the images on the front (removing all text), I purchased the next paper. I embroidered with white thread on white canvas, using a limited variety of stitches to simplify the images. The effect of the white on white is something I have worked with previously; it makes it difficult to view the images from a distance. One must get close and spend more time studying the work to pick out the details, to garner some meaning. By embroidering the appropriated photographs and using no color palette, I dramatically slowed down the process of making and receiving images. I wanted to project the concepts of care into a world that seemed to be spinning around me at a dizzying speed. This work is my attempt to infuse meaning and create a new relationship between myself and the work, and ultimately the work and the viewer.
Detail: William S. Burrough’s cut-up typescripts, a piano arrangement of Beethoven’s "Grosse Fuge" and Grandmaster Flash’s turntable are part of troves of Beat literature, classical music and hip-hop culture en route to the New York Public Library, the Julliard School and the Smithsonian.
