projects > Selected reviews, books, interviews, & catalogue essays

..."Molly Springfield's Chapter IX, 2008, apparently a hand-drawn replica of a poor-quality photocopy of a book, stands as an inverse of Jean Baudrillards's simulacrum--an original forged from the copy it supplants. The depicted book, a nineteenth-century handbook on drawing, is open to the head of a chapter entitled "On Drawing from Flat Copies," which turns out to be an argument against the educational use of the technique Springfield employed to produce her drawing. The representational layers are legion. A rapid oscillation is irresistible, slipping into the described instructional scene as into a dream, and being jolted back out to a close surface study by a slight vagary in the hand-drawn type, or the sudden realization that the apparent toner smudge in the crease of the book is in fact rendered in carefully stacked freehand pencil strokes. Such oscillation is precisely the condition for which the most self-conscious work in this exhibition primes the viewer, who experiences the visuality of writing and the interweaving of apparently autonomous visual objects. These perspectives permanently enrich each other."