Home  GessoHead - Blog This One Stopped Me: Artomatic Part Two
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This One Stopped Me: Artomatic Part Two |
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May 24,2008
Artomatic is so big - this one is spread out over 8 floors and has over 700 visual artists - that after the first half hour I found myself pretty much sprinting through because, let's face it, life has only so many hours that one can commit to this and I already knew it would be a multi-day affair. So it takes something special to slow me down, much less to get me to stop for more than a few minutes. Tracy Lee's installation, "Refused:Return to Sender" did it. I'm not usually a big fan of conceptual work and the installation is not particularly compelling visually, but something about the collection of snapshots stuck on the wall as if on a teenager's bulletin board, the slides in plastic sleeves and the old-fashioned baby photo book pulled me in and I read the narrative. It tells the story in clipped, bleak prose of alcoholic parents who utterly and completely excised their two adult children from their lives, going so far as to return all family snapshots and refusing to accept the mailed announcement of the birth of their first grandchild. Then I looked more closely at the photos on the wall that seem at first to be typical family snapshots of Mom and Dad with kids at play, having a picnic, etc.and saw that each time a parent is pictured - in the park, by the pool, in the backyard - they are holding or are in close proximity to a beer. I don't know if this is Tracy's true story or if it is a fiction, but in either case, she has made a heartbreaking, deeply moving piece of work.
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