Alexandra Bell Convocation

 

    It’s really interesting to see Alexandra Bell’s process and how she takes a newspaper page and works with what is there and not there (naming unnamed whiteness, stripping text down to the essential information, analyzing photo choice and layout, and such). One of my art classes went to see her exhibition before the talk, but something about how she described her process, verbalizing the details, shed new light on it and makes me want to go back and look at them more. I love when I can see the process of an artwork laid out, as it invites viewers to think about how the artwork got to where it is and eliminated the artificial ‘objectivity’ (instead, I feel that exposing process helps the viewer realize that the artist is not some mystical magician that conjures up the artwork all of a sudden- but rather engages in a slow process of creating and refining and thinking, etc.). I also recognize that this is a key part of the Counternarratives series, as she directly discussed working against a “false balance” that media often attempts (she described it: the pursuit of fairness/objectivity that flattens power structures). 





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