| In this body of work Springfield continues to confuse the activity of reading and viewing and writing and drawing by using pages of text from books on art and philosophy as the subject of her dry and scrupulously-rendered graphite drawings.
Springfield is a Washington D.C.-based artist who has for years now relied on text documents as the sitters for her art. She is part photorealist, part conceptual draughtsman. Her drawings are crisp, beautiful recreations of the text page which ruminate on the notions of originality, intent and meaning in language and signification.
In this series, by working from sloppy Xeroxes, Springfield loads the deck in her poker game with representation and reality by absenting the original document. Locating the author of the meaning of the content in this hall of mirrors can seem a bit like trying to find the father of a child spawned from an orgy or the hurler of a rock in the midst of a riot.
As works that cross back and forth from art to writing Springfield’s drawings are translations and as any translator will admit, something is always lost in translation. That sense of loss pervades Springfield’s work. Early in her career she used notes passed in high school as source material for her drawings. This didn't just mix up high and low but explored a personal form of nostalgia and time passed. In a later series of works she found another way to explore that sense of loss or absence as a culturally shared experience by reproducing cards from a discarded library card catalogue. It was a series of 10 drawings based on 10 different cards each one cataloguing Homer's Odyssey, one of the paternity texts of Western Culture. Each of the cards references a book that is slightly different, either by virtue of its translator, edition or publisher. The result is a somber meditation on sameness and difference in an age of mass production, reproduction and appropriation and a cagey attack on the legitimacy of canonical authority. |
