BALTIMORE SUN (2009)
June 28th, 2009
Sondheim finalists present a collage of ideas
By Tim Smith
If there is a common theme linking the finalists for the Janet & Walker Sondheim Prize, it may be that the methods of creating art can be as important as the art itself. "This year is a very process-oriented, installation-based type of show," says Gary Kachadourian, visual arts coordinator with the Baltimore Office for Promotion in the Arts, which created the prize to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Artscape in 2006. "It is a good mix of people, representing a good mix of ideas." Those ideas include finding the artistic potential in dirt, photocopied books, recycled materials, barren parking lots, a polar bear's heart rate and even vintage cartoon character Mr. Magoo. The finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants living in the Baltimore/Washington region. One will be selected by a jury for the $25,000 prize on July 11.
Molly Springfield
Marcel Proust's multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu - commonly known in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time - is daunting enough to read. Consider what Springfield has done in a 28-drawing art work called Translation.
The 31-year-old D.C.-based artist gathered copies of the existing English editions of the first book in the Proust series, Swann's Way, and photocopied the first chapter of each one, two pages at a time. "Then I put together my own translation," Springfield says. Mixing the photocopies from the various editions, she painstakingly re-created those pages by hand in graphite, like a monk copying a book in the Middle Ages.
Each distinctive typeface is captured; underlining or notes penciled in the margins by Springfield in any of the books used before the photocopying are, in turn, reproduced again in the final artwork. "I tried to create the actual experience of recollection, in the way the novel does," the artist says. "Repetitions and omissions that happen from page to page parallel the experience of remembering."
By Tim Smith
If there is a common theme linking the finalists for the Janet & Walker Sondheim Prize, it may be that the methods of creating art can be as important as the art itself. "This year is a very process-oriented, installation-based type of show," says Gary Kachadourian, visual arts coordinator with the Baltimore Office for Promotion in the Arts, which created the prize to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Artscape in 2006. "It is a good mix of people, representing a good mix of ideas." Those ideas include finding the artistic potential in dirt, photocopied books, recycled materials, barren parking lots, a polar bear's heart rate and even vintage cartoon character Mr. Magoo. The finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants living in the Baltimore/Washington region. One will be selected by a jury for the $25,000 prize on July 11.
Molly Springfield
Marcel Proust's multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu - commonly known in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time - is daunting enough to read. Consider what Springfield has done in a 28-drawing art work called Translation.
The 31-year-old D.C.-based artist gathered copies of the existing English editions of the first book in the Proust series, Swann's Way, and photocopied the first chapter of each one, two pages at a time. "Then I put together my own translation," Springfield says. Mixing the photocopies from the various editions, she painstakingly re-created those pages by hand in graphite, like a monk copying a book in the Middle Ages.
Each distinctive typeface is captured; underlining or notes penciled in the margins by Springfield in any of the books used before the photocopying are, in turn, reproduced again in the final artwork. "I tried to create the actual experience of recollection, in the way the novel does," the artist says. "Repetitions and omissions that happen from page to page parallel the experience of remembering."
