Veins

by Courtney Carter and Alina van Ryzin

The conceptual text for Courtney and Alina's exhibit:

This installation is one of three satellite installations, part of a library-wide exhibit honoring the life of Margaret Gest by displaying her original works in original ways. With a fresh perspective, we took her paintings out of the congested closets of Special Collections where they were stacked for an audience of dust mites and spread them out (if only to a certain extent) for a somewhat different audience. Miriam Thrall, a close friend of Gest, traces the use of line in Gest's work when describing the Gest Center:

“The high windows of both front conference rooms on the first floor look across wide stretches of campus and supplement the strong lines of Margaret Gest’s paintings throughout the rooms."

Following Thrall's lead, we have traced various lines through the paintings and out unto the walls of the space – drawing you both towards and away from the works simultaneously. We wanted to make linear connections between the paintings, Margaret Gest, and even you, however limited or limitless those connections may be. There are four layers of paintings, starting with a self-portrait of Gest herself as the first and deepest layer. We wonder to what extent the space between the frames, in the sense of depth if not horizontally or vertically, acts as a facilitator or an inhibitor of connection. We just hope that there is not too little or too much: Margaret Gest deserves a glance reborn, and air has a nasty habit for collecting dust.

Enjoy.

These photographs represent the conceptualization of "Veins".

The artists string together the photos with lines of fishing wire and tape.

One of the most notable qualities of Margaret Gest's paintings was her treatment of landscapes. A key theme of all of these pictures was her use of lines. Interested by this, Alina and Courtney thought of an inventive way to represent the use of the line. Using the available materials, they created a diorama to replicate the imagined exhibit.

This webpage attempts to replicate the way they constructed the diorama by creating lines between the images used in making the exhibit.

A fair amount of the work in the exhibits came from the class blog. Below is a text from one of Courtney and Alina's blog posts that explains the themes in their exhibit.

This sketch is on the back of a photograph of Margaret Gest