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Artist Statement: We are surrounded by pre-packaged, homogenous, benign, manufactured content. Cookie-cutter images: women who all look the same have dulled our concept of beauty, black-and-white concepts of truth reduce fact and fiction into neat little boxes. An assembly line mentality, to reproduce and reduce things into edible bites. Instead of embracing cynicism — an easy route I am often inclined to take — this piece points towards possibility. The lightning bolt breaks monotony. All original art has the element of surprise, eliciting moments that feel truly different. The world is newly crystallized. I chose Tarzana, designed by Zuzana Licko, a woman in a typography world so dominated by men. It is a beautiful and feminine font, but when used repeatedly, loses elegance. Licko is the co-founder of Emigre, whose work always emerges from the bleak landscape and zaps us.
Points of discussion: Antiquated business models that stifle new creativity, the empty beauty of advertising (hollow smiles), women using submission as manipulation, Dolly Parton's self-containment, change within safety zones is not change at all, black-and-white thinking, ambiguity and unpredictability, amateur art and professional art, a woman's concept and intellectualization of her own beauty, lying to tell the truth (fiction versus non-fiction), feeling as memory, truth is perception, editorship and context, personhood, ambition, lack of choice and resulting frames of reference.
Artist bio: Nancy Smith is a graphic designer and writer based in San Francisco. She is interested in exploring the connections between literature, design, philosophy, and art. Her work has been published in Communication Arts, The Believer, Paper, The Rumpus, and Seattle Weekly. She studied design at Parsons and received her MA in Media Studies from The New School. She has an MFA in Writing from USF and is the editor of Stumble. Say hello at: nancymadethis.com
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