Tale
an installation at 23 Sandy Gallery
Portland, OR -- Sept 4 - 26, 2009
"Tale" installation by Holly A. Senn at 23 Sandy Gallery, 2009. Photo credit: Dan Kvitka.
Artist Statement
"Sometimes I think that all the world's an altered page." (Rosamond Purcell, Bookworm, p. 35)
Narratives of real or imagined events create living landscapes of time and place. Here, on this tree lined street, the natural world merges with the intellectual world. The trees' enlarged seeds invite us to consider how tales unfold, grow, and ultimately alter our thoughts.
I create sculptures and installations in which I explore the life cycle of ideas—the organic, non-linear process in which thoughts have a genesis and then are disseminated, adopted or refuted, forgotten or referenced. My art investigations are inextricably intertwined with my work as a virtual reference librarian at Pacific Lutheran University where, while surrounded by books, I interact with patrons who prefer digital resources. As I cut, rip, realign and glue, I reflect on each new generations' collective erasure of some element of the past and its casting of new ideas into the future. My work is as ephemeral and fleeting as ideas committed to paper.
- Holly A. Senn