1stfans Twitter Art Feed Artist for February 2009: Mary Temple

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BrooklynMuseum
January 27, 2009

This piece by Mary Temple is being featured in the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed during February 2009. Join 1stfans: http://www.brooklynmuseum.o... Mary Temple Currency 2007-present On September 24...

This piece by Mary Temple is being featured in the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed during February 2009.

Join 1stfans: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/join/1s...

Mary Temple
Currency
2007-present

On September 24, 2007 the president of Iran spoke at Columbia University amid protests and much controversy. I found the event, coverage and images of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compelling and made some drawings of him from various Webbased news sources. The drawings piqued my interest in him as a character—I wanted to know more about his history as well as Irans past. Drawing him expanded my thinking about world events. Ive continued to make a drawing of a world leader every day since then. My goal in the beginning was simply to concentrate on one event each day—to try to grasp a minuscule portion of the barrage of information that surrounds each of us in a 24-hour news cycle. As the research and drawings accumulated, I found that the news events marked my own personal history as well as delineating a (biased) global event time line. In order to underscore that relationship, and the diaristic nature of the undertaking, I hung the drawings in a calendar format—7 day (columns) across, and 5 to 6 week (rows) down. I placed the drawings on the page according to my own feelings of optimism or pessimism regarding the days event, the higher on the page the greater my hope for world harmony.

Each evening I select a story and the character (a world leader), draw a portrait in pen and ink on a tabloid size sheet of paper, and record the event with an image caption at the bottom of the page. The drawing is then scanned and emailed to a museum. Every morning the museum staff receives my email scan, prints the portrait on a similar tabloid size sheet of handmade paper and hangs it in a gallery next to the previous days drawings in the calendar grid. Entire calendar years accumulate in this way.

The title, of the piece, Currency, most obviously references my desire and attempt to keep current of world events, to try to understand some of what is happening in the world. It also refers to something that fascinates me about an industry that trades in a product that is only valuable until the moment it is heard, at which time it instantly loses its value. Yesterdays news is an artifact which no longer has currency or power as a trade worthy item. The title Currency also refers to the scale of the portraits themselves, which might evoke a bank note or dollar bill portrait, the image of power and money entwined.

-Mary Temple

More information: http://tinyurl.com/cma9hz

Category: Nonprofits & Activism

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MarieAram (2 months ago) Show Hide

Marked as spam

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hikjlm (9 months ago) Show Hide

Marked as spam

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