Laura Noel Sorts the Debris of Mental Minutia at Spruill Gallery
Laura Noel, To Do Installation Project (detail), 2011, dimensions variable.
Image courtesy the artist.
Image courtesy the artist.
The achingly familiar, creeping anxiety about forgetting some small but crucial task hangs over artist Laura Noel’s installation To Do, part of the exhibition of her work collectively titled Subject Matters now on view at Spruill Gallery. Noel collected 3,000 to-do lists from friends, acquaintances, and strangers and covered every inch of wall space in a room of the gallery, a late nineteenth-century former farmhouse on Ashford Dunwoody Road in suburban Atlanta. It’s touching and disquieting to see so many lists together, and spending time with the installation does bring to light some interesting subject matter...
Laura Noel, To Do Installation Project, 2011, dimensions variable.Image courtesy the artist.
...For the viewer, the lists might suggest a touching shared
humanity—we are all our own pathetic taskmasters, reminding
ourselves to buy milk and cut the grass. But Noel makes clear
in her artist’s statement that such minutia keeps people’s
minds away from larger philosophical questions, a sort of
absorption she hopes to avoid.
Click here to read the review in its entirety.
humanity—we are all our own pathetic taskmasters, reminding
ourselves to buy milk and cut the grass. But Noel makes clear
in her artist’s statement that such minutia keeps people’s
minds away from larger philosophical questions, a sort of
absorption she hopes to avoid.
Click here to read the review in its entirety.
