Counternarratives Convocation

A Teenager with Promise, 2017, Alexandra Bell

Alexandra Bell's convocation was really cool, she has an insight into news media that I haven't seen before, and it's cool that Lawrence brought an artist with overtly political work to campus. Her Counternarratives are so interesting because they so clearly show the bias that newspapers have that many people don't see. I love how they are shown first with all the annotations, and then in a redacted and corrected version, so that the artistic process becomes part of the finished piece. That allows a lot of clarity and transparency in the pieces that helps their impact really land. I also just really like how her marginalia looks aesthetically, bright red writing on white background.

Relating to our installation projects, her artwork makes me think a lot about the use of space. Partly from how big they are, which kind of forces you to pay attention to them (and the fact that they used to be pasted onto walls guerrilla style). But also how they use space within them, how just by a newspaper making one picture bigger than another, that gives one article priority over another (or falsely equating the police officer with Michael Brown). This is making me really think about how the three dimensional space that we are using can be used (or not) to create a hierarchy of images and objects within a room. Her work reveals just how important it is to think about these hierarchies in all media, and be actively critical of them.

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