Engaging with the Sublime
Hyperallergic covered MASS MoCA's recent expansion, and highlighted work by faculty member Mary Lum, whose installation, Lorem ipsum (Assembly) is currently on view.
The opening of Building 6 (which boosts MASS MoCA among the ranks of the largest art museums in the country) features long-term installations by artists including Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Mary Lum, former Bennington faculty Gunnar Schonbeck, and James Turrell.
Lum’s monumental painting, Assembly (Lorem Ipsum)—inspired by the text that graphic designers and typesetters use as placeholders for actual texts, and which was originally drawn from Cicero’s writings on ethics, interspersed with the words of the First Amendment— covers four walls, and fragments writing, image, and pattern, speaking to the way in which we acquire information and see language in today’s world.
Of Lum's work, the article observed: "The art in Building 6 seems to collect around a theme of not seeing details immediately, and having them materialize with an epiphany. Mary Lum’s painted wall installation...does this subtly, and to great effect. Inspired by the filler text used in publication design, Assembly presents words and letters chopped up, shifted a few inches and jumbled. It might be what one of William Burroughs’s cut-up poems looked like in his mind. It’s a work that invites viewers to take their time, but not in an overly demanding way. As we make out the words, mirrors placed every couple of feet apart reflect our bodies as we look, but also the street and green mountains surrounding the museum."
Lum's work was also featured in a recent article in Townvibe Berkshire.
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