MARIA PARK

Composition, 2013

Toomey Tourell Fine Art
San Francisco, CA
December 17, 2013 - January 31, 2014

"...but within its strangeness it seems to me coherent." (Truffaut, 1967)

The series Composition is inspired by Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), a film based on Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel on the effects of mass media on literature. Truffaut's first film in color as well as in English, Fahrenheit 451 has been described by critics as "display[ing] the artisan more than the artist." I find that the strangeness of the film produces possibilities for the viewer to gain a heightened awareness of the medium of film itself, creating lingering moments of abstraction where image is suspended from content.

This series comprises four parts:

Still 1-9 are based on the opening sequence of the film, which shows a bag containing all the books found in a searched apartment slowly falling four flights off a balcony. These works are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of polycarbonate, each 8" x 10".

Composition 1-3 are close-ups of the bag of books, in varying states of abstraction. These are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of Plexiglas, each 36" x 30".

Cover 1-12 are images of Penguin Book covers published between 1938 and 1964, excluding any text. These are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of glass, each 8" x 10" (Cover 4 is on polycarbonate).

Bookends, Set 1 and 2 each include painted cubes and books on shelves. Depicting scenes from the film wrapped around two adjacent sides, these 7" colored Plexiglas cubes are painted in acrylic and arranged on the shelves as bookends.

Selected Images