Persuasion (gallery critique)

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU READ THIS PHRASE versus this phrase? Those first seven words probably sounded louder in your head right? Why? All of the letters are the same as the second portion and the font size is the same as well. The meaning doesn’t change, however the tone in your head sounds angrier, more excited, or just in general louder right? As we grow up, we don’t just learn how to read and write, we also learn how to manipulate the words we are reading and writing. We learn to use quotes, bold, capitals, italics, underlines, and many other tools when writing in order to influence how our reader absorbs our text. In the same way, others use these things and others to influence how we are understanding text, pictures, ad campaigns, and everything else in our daily lives. In other words, how we are persuaded or how others persuade us.

Priscilla Varner plays with all of these ideas in her exhibit, Persuasion, which was shown in the McNamara Gallery for most of April. In her artist statement, she mentions the idea that differences in texts could change how a viewer views her pieces, therefore, for her six pieces, each has text “associated” with it, but the text shows many different fonts, which induce different feelings in the viewer and therefore change the whole experience for the viewer. The text in this case is six or seven different adjectives or nouns that could be associated with the image. Sometimes these words work together and other times they are very different, however they “persuade” the viewer to think of the piece in a certain way, the same way titles often influence viewers to see pieces how the artist wishes. For instance, in a piece titled Un Jour D’hiver, the words listed are cold, dreamy, historic, soft, somber, unhurried, and whispers. Clearly a broad range of terms that all have varying degrees of strength. “Cold” would most typically be assumed as a bad thing, for instance a cold waiting room, cold hands, being cold, but at the other end, cold could be a cold drink on a summer's day, it could be crisp or refreshing, all of which aren’t typically bad things. The same goes for unhurried. On the one hand, it could be nice lazy days were you have plenty of time to dream and relax because you are unhurried, but at the opposite end of the spectrum it could be those frustrating unhurried geese that are crossing in front of your car when you are late for school! All of this depends on the viewer. Please note, these words all bring images together but we have not yet discussed the actual image for this piece. This one was a black and white snowy picture of France, with several notable landmarks within it. Therefore we have the cold idea (snow), the dreamy idea (snowy days are sometimes dreamy, as is being anywhere in Europe), historic idea (with the landmarks and the black and white), soft (the picture looks a bit blurred from the black and white and snow), and so on. Yet these impressions all depend on the viewer, for somebody who doesn’t like snow, this piece is going to bring a lot of different thoughts to mind. Plus, we already had images of geese and waiting rooms in our minds when we finally looked at the image.

The next interesting thing that Varner mentions in her artist statement is that oftentimes people read the title before looking at the piece and interpret the piece based on the title, or vice versa. In this case, the titles were all in French, so that didn’t have as much effect on me, but the words included did. Therefore I made sure to alternate, sometimes I read the words first and other times I looked at the piece first and then at the words. Obviously I read the words first on the snowy picture, Un Jour D’hiver, which can be seen by how much thought I put into the words above. However, I interpreted one of the other pieces, that of a stone with the word Juillet printed on it with a little bit of greenery growing over it, very differently. Since I looked at the image first, I saw it as a stone on the ground (which could be wrong) that was used as a marker for a grave (which could also be wrong). Therefore, while the image was bright and inviting, I still thought of it as a little bit sad because I made the association of a cemetery. I then read the title, Juillet, which really meant nothing to me since I had already read the stone, and then the words, in this case they were, anniversary, monumental, reconciliation, revolutionary, rights, and unity. Now some of these could go with my cemetery idea, but others don’t quite fit, for instance, unity? Therefore, I viewed this piece drastically differently than I would have if I had read the words first. So, the artist did manage to persuade me in both cases, while I made the choice to pick which part of her art was going to persuade me.