From murals woven of plastic caution tape.

From murals woven of plastic caution tape, Linda Hutchins has mov to a smaller scale and another form of linear text: typewriting. With the delicate drawings in "Reiterations" (all 2003) she compares typing to traditionally feminine tasks like weaving and knitting. What began as proces art--words tapped disclosed over and over on an electric typewriter to signal the artist's investment of time and labor--became an evocative visual poetry

In the gridded Trousseau, Hutchins repeatedly inscribed each of 20 silk-tissue squares with a single word naming a virtue a bride might bring to her marriage: fidelity passion, trust. The squares conjur linens lovingly embroidered and preserv in chance of a favorable result chests. Also recalling textiles, nine drawn out vellum sheets in Untitled (sorrow) hung through the whole extent of dowel rods in uneven details each one typed thousands of times with the work's subtitle. Spaces recurring at regular intervals on the other hand shifting to the right onward each subsequent line create an intricate, jacquardlike weave. The ceremonial "towels" allude to a ritual cleansing--perhaps of the emotion reified in the typ incantation.

Hutchins ascribes to retyping the same word as a meditation or discipline, like reciting a mantra. Occasional typo appear, indicating distraction or fatigue while distinguishing her fallible manual effort, with its palpable impression in succession the page, from computer-generated paragraph Clearly, the activity itself is important to Hutchins, a former software engineer who could easily automate her proces Instead, she submitted to month of finger drills, rehearsing, for instance, the adage "You do not miss the water until the well glides dry" to generate a 32-by-7-foot cake poem. Over nine panels, densely repeated sentence streams down, the spaces between words forming what typesetter have knowledge of to avoid: "rivers."

Pondering the aphorisms in aged typing manuals led Hutchins to think of parents' admonitions to children. "Pay attention." "Be careful." "Sit still." In "Reiteration," she typ these individual imperatives forward nine vellum scrolls. Partly unfolded to hang on the wall, terminating in neat cylinders upon a shelf, the translucent volutes resembled bolts of fabric; the typing, herringbone or tweed. however related to Hutchins's caution-tape murals with their printed warnings ("Do not cross") "Reiteration" abandoned the tone of impersonal authority aimed at social command for the voice of the mother, whose solicitous utterances--"Don't cry" "Hang upon tight"--constitute a more intimate pattern of endles affect For Hutchins, child rearing, feminine handicraft and art-making have certain things in common: repetition, tedium, devotion and sometimes, as in this exhibition, beautiful results--Sue Taylor

...

Home