Frances Stark Exibition review by Max (Yu Sun)

I went to MIT List Gallery this week after some one told me art works there were a little bit conceptual and hard to understand. Well, my life is full of challenges and I am willing to explore and solve puzzles.

The first impression of the exhibition is that the style is more unified than the "Artists' Books show", I think the main reason is because it is a single artist exhibition. But there are still a lot of diversity nested in the exhibition, for instance, various of materials, various of way of assembling. Also, based on these differences, my emotion can be affected by the author's emotion at the time he was creating them.

Let me started with one of my favorite piece of Frances Stark's works. The name of that piece is "Toward a Score for Load every rift with ore", and I am so lucky that I found it online. The first thing I love about this art is the sources. Stark used daily life materials like letters, shipping labels, recipes to make the collage, and drew a chair in the middle of the collage. I have a feeling that I am sitting on the black chair and trying to handle my everyday life. It is the true feeling, not just from a printed pictures. Second, I was thinking about why he cut all those papers in to incomplete chunks? My very own answer is that he wanted to leave the audience some sort of imagination about the art work, I may say "Nothing is perfect."

The second one I want to mention is the one named "Pretty Ugly". The painting is a portrait girl. When I saw it for the first time with its title on it, I thought that was really ugly. But when I double checked it, I saw the girl's face were formed by flowers. And I think that is why the author called the painting Pretty Ugly. I have to admit the word "ugly" was really leading me to a wrong place at first. But fine arts needed to be watch carefully from itself.

Also, there was one piece that interested me. It was a piece of yellow paper, with a computer directory tree on it. The sub-directory was full of MS Word file. And I found one special file hidden among those Word files. That really took me some time to figure out what was that, and what is the massage the author wanted to pass.

There were few questions in my mind when I am done seeing the exhibition. Most of Frances Stark's artworks I saw were made with daily materials, and he always put things that have nothing relation to each other together to form a new object. The object could be a daily life stuff, or even a creative, assembled invention. But why is the artist think that way? How could he managed to put those stuff together? Were the ideas coming to his mind directly by some inspiration, or he was intentionally doing so? But anyway, Spark's works really give those daily matters a new life, and make them three-dimensioned other than laying on a 2D paper.

That is a great exhibition!

BHCC Artists' Book Gallery Review -- Yao

It was my first time to watch a book gallery, I expected what I would see then. It was a small gallery with glass walls, all various of books or pieces of artworks lay on the shelves and desks quietly.
I was surprised by the creative and the inspirations the artists had, when I was touching the pages, watching the color and the words, I was keeping thinking one question: how they did it!

This is the first artwork I was really interested in. For the first sight, it really looked like Chinese bamboo slip because of the shape and the weight, also because it looked very old. After I took it out from the paper felt box I found it was created by wood rulers and threaded with a thin hemp rope. On each ruler, there was some pattern and words, recorded some changes, plants and animals.
If a book could be called a good book, it must be harmonic from inside to outside, this book represented this point well. I noticed the box, it also contained some history, some colored pen drawing, piece of old map and some route line.

For the second one, I would choose this "waved" and "curled" book, I watched it from further and found this looked like some building gather around, came closer, I can say it showed the transformation and the stop motion from some point. When I tried to explore what the picture was in the left green one, it was transforming from light to dark, when I looked at its outside, I saw it transformed from green to city view, I think this book wants to represent a thought that both nature and human can be exited well, no matter it is natural or artificial. When I pay attention to the car one on the right, the car seemed drive from the right page to the left, and the road is waved, the pillars and the windows were the scene the car passed by.

And the last one I want to show is this fragile one. There were only a few pages threaded by waxed line, each page had two thin pages stick together. I read the content in the book, it said the paper is waxed, the pattern bees are provided by a person, and the paper produced by another person, the words also told me how the bees work, corporate, and communicate with each other, this book praised bees, the words are warm, kind as the color of the page, and the soft of the wax.