Thursday, June 28, 2007

Rebecca Murtaugh in the NYT

Check out Rebecca's work and words in an article by Penelope Green today's New York Times on the front of the House and Home section.


"...Rebecca Murtaugh, an artist, was thinking about space, value and the “thingness” of objects, as she put it, when she created her 2001 Post-its installation in her bedroom in Arcata, Calif., where she was living at the time.

“I was really mesmerized by Post-its,” she said last week. “They come in all these colors. They are beautiful. They have a purpose, but it’s different for everyone: sometimes it’s a note, ‘I’ll be back,’ or maybe it’s a phone number. But for all these important things, the note itself is always ephemeral and temporary. Yet it’s carrying all this valuable information. So there is this duality: it’s disposable, but it’s very valuable. I wanted to mark an important space, not a book with a note, but an entire room.”

It took Ms. Murtaugh six days to cover her bedroom and all the objects in it with Post-it notes. She used the original yellow for areas that she said had less value, like the walls, and neon colors for areas of more value, like the bed coverings and the rugs. She spent over $1,000 at her local stationers, and titled the piece, “To Mark a Significant Space in the Bedroom #1.” Only five people saw the original, including her now-husband, who had gone away on vacation and returned to find the work in place. (Ms. Murtaugh dismantled it after 24 hours, but the piece lives on in digital form on design blogs like insurgentmuse.com and the artist’s Web site, rebeccamurtaugh.com.).

“He was kind of alarmed,” she said. “It sort of felt like you were on the inside of a piñata.”

Her relationship to the more mundane applications of Post-its has been irrevocably altered. “What’s interesting is that I don’t use them for organizing anymore,” said Ms. Murtaugh, who teaches art at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “I don’t want to waste them.”"



Congratulations Becky!!!!

1 Comments:

Blogger pily said...

Thanks for the site, and nice blog!

10:14 AM  

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