Alexandra Bell’s convocation is fascinating! When we are reading an article from a newspaper, we tend to subconsciously think about the stories as “facts” and forget about the subjective perspective that the news might contain. As reading closer and paying more attention to the wording, some problematic issues will appear. When I am viewing Bell’s actual work in the Wriston Gallery, I felt a strong sense of the artist herself being presenting into her works: The way she changes the layout of the newspaper, and the way she marks or highlight some text is like what we do when we are reading a book or a textbook. The way her comments are written feel like we are exploring what is going on in her mind. The conversation she has with herself while reading the newspaper is successfully transformed into words with directional marks. Her work is brave and bold to me because she presents the thing that we all thought about but did not mind to actually bring it up. The way she uses black sharpie to cross out all the “unnecessary” information is very unique and real. It reveals how we read an article or what information we truly pay attention to in a very explicit way. Just like Rita’s installation final project, the way they shows how we read emails is even more relatable than Bell’s newspaper article example. There is so much information that we don’t really need to read in a long text, but they do still necessarily need to be on there for the completeness of a news or a story. This contradiction and unchangeable feeling towards media information is thought provoking, Alexandra Bell’s artwork absolutely provides me a new perspective to reading in general.
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| A Teenager With Promise, 2017 (Alexandra Bell) |
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| "Charlottesville", 2017, Sincerely, Tommy (Photo: Darryl Richardson) (Alexandra Bell) |
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