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News & ArtsTuesday, October 20, 2009
Visual Art Currently Hanging
Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 12:45 PM
In Maria Marshall's 2000 video at Western Bridge, two children in a vast sunlit room unwrap gift boxes until the room is full of wrapping paper and bows and ribbons; then the video reverses and the children spin around tidying up. All this work and unwork is accompanied by the voiceover of a child reading a particularly utopian speech given by Bill Clinton in 1993, after he was elected but before he took office, about the hope that work provides, about how people need jobs to make them feel like people. The kids are working, too. Everybody is all about work. The artist may have meant this to be creepy (in the past her videos have been all hard-hitting and what-have-you), but actually I find it reassuring. It's installed in the bedroom at Western Bridge, and sitting on the end of the bed watching it I feel like I could go to sleep.
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