Marcy Assignment 1

I found Professor O'Donnell's show, "Memory Maps", to be very interesting. I've seen some of her work before, but never really understood it until I got the chance to read her statement and hear her talk. The show was very cohesive, simply because all the pieces related to the same thing: her memories. The exhibit flowed well because, even though it was not one large narrative, with all of the branching out designs and repeating patterns it felt almost like a timeline. In order to engage viewers, she included a piece that consisted of blocks that she encouraged everyone to handle and arrange. Also, the framing of certain pieces created repeating patterns, such as the squares of the artist books that led into the squares of the film stills. All of the pieces were simple enough at first glance, but the longer you looked at them, the more layers of meaning you could unravel. She stated that while the pieces were about her personal experiences, everyone could relate to the themes and feelings addressed and find similarities in their own lives.


The piece I chose to focus on was Story Told, which was the accordion artist book stretched out on a shelf. This piece had several square black wooden frames filled with two panes of glass. On the panes of glass there were blank rectangles printed that mirrored the rectangular pieces between the glass. Inside these thin glass boxes were secrets printed on bits of plastic or acetate. These secrets clumped together making most of them unreadable. All of these square panels were hinged together into the accordion shape.

Professor O'Donnell described the intentions behind much of her work during her lecture. She said that memories, and more specifically secrets, were at the core of all of her pieces. She also said that she incorporated a sort of "hiding and revealing" in her work that allowed her to share these secrets somewhat, but also to keep some to herself, or to make viewers work for the secrets. I think that this idea of hiding/revealing is very prominent in this piece. Although the clear glass and plastic materials would presumably reveal all of her secrets, they clumped together, allowing only a few of them to be read while the rest were indecipherable. I also connected with this piece because I had seen it before during the tours of faculty members' studios. I remember her saying then that she had not anticipated the way that the static would make the secrets clump together like that, but that she liked it that way. This stuck with me because I always find it interesting when ideas or techniques don't work out as planned, but still come out better that way. I think this lent itself to the hiding/revealing theme in her work and made the piece stronger.