The Cellar Image of the Day

Annie Vought takes hand written letters/notes/lists, blows them up to giant size and prints them. Then she cuts out all the paper without print on it.

Quote:

Email, text messages, instant messaging and Twitter are all examples of fun and immediate means of “written” communication. Through the computer I am in touch with people I may never have seen before and I can respond in real time to a loved one. But with the ubiquity of this access and convenience, we are losing the tangible handwritten letter. Handwritten records are fragments of individual histories. In the penmanship, word choice, and spelling the author is often revealed in spite of him/herself. A letter is physical confirmation of who we were at the moment it was written, or all we have left of a person or a time.
I have been working with cut out correspondence for the past four years. I meticulously recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and intricately dissecting the negative spaces with an Exact-o knife. The handwriting and the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it strong and sculptural, despite its apparent fragility. In these paper cutouts, I focus on the text, structure, and emotion of the letter in an elaborate investigation into the properties of writing and expression. Penmanship, word choice, and spelling all contribute to possible narratives about who that person is and what they are like. My recreating the letters is an extended concentration on peoples’ inner lives and the ways they express their thoughts through writing.

Sure, just use a 3-D printer.

mumble soulless grumble damn sputter nerds spittle...

Wow. Blow up the writing and then over days, using an exacto knife, render it illegible. Amazing.

Clearly, Annie has no friends bold enough to remove the knife from her grip, and take her out for some *fun*.

Begeezus, get a life, Annie!

This is the kind of modern art that you just have to turn your back on, and walk away from, in order to appreciate it clearly.

Art is highly subjective, but everyone should be able to appreciate the difficulty and dedication of craft.
I guess cheap plastic crap from wallymart is the only thing people can identify with anymore. Sad.

Overheard in a wallymart-like store years ago and stuck with me:

"That picture can't be very good. It only costs $10"

If she was cutting out letters from beautifully formed letters, like the monks made in the middle ages (calligraphy), then it would look good.

This looks like mundane penmanship, at best. At worst, it's a scribbled mess that you can't even read. It looks no better after Annie cuts it all out.

Art should kick-start a spark in your inner-most being. No sparks, here.

If you go to the link in the op, you'll see she does all kinds of different writing. These aren't something she makes up, these are actual documents, letters, notes, doodles, lists, that mean something to someone. Some get blown up 4 to 6 feet high, before she starts cutting them. Some aren't continuous, like doodles or snippets, and the segments have to be supported on pins.

Went there, viewed them all.

Nary a spark of anything beautiful, to be found. She could be cutting out pictures of dog kibble, imo.

Savage.

They're not suppose to be pretty, they're significant in content and context to the owner. Annie's contribution is the craft.

You can go here.

I can appreciate someone's dedication to craft, and the difficulty required to create such things as in the picture above without liking the end result, or recognizing it as art as I see it. And it is possible to have this type of opinion without being all Wal-Mart and shit.

And besides, it's Wal-Mart, not Walm-Art. Who would go to Wal-Mart to look for art anyway?

She's got craft - but it's wasted on the mundane scribbles of writings she has chosen as subjects.

Not only is calligraphy beautiful - thus making her end product much better looking, but the paper it's written on, is high quality.

She works too hard to only have her art appreciated by the few who wrote out the scribbled originals she chose to cut out.

If pearls before swine is stupid, surely scribbles before an artist, is a caution, at least.

I see her end product as just a tad creepy:

"Yes, Monday through Friday she labored for years, to cut these delicate shapes out of paper."

"Had to lock her up, when it drove her mad. She took to cutting out artwork on the sidewalls of tires, poor thing."

It's cool, in a wow that's interesting but pointless kind of way, but I'm also having a hard time considering it art. It might be OCD. I wonder, if I photocopy and blow up pages of typewritten business correspondence and use a sharpie to color in all the closed loop bits of letters, and tell you I'm bringing attention to the emptiness of life, is that art too? And if it is, will anyone (preferably several anyones) pay me a couple hundred bucks for each one I finish?

Yes, I am a fuddy-duddy.

There is art, and then there's salable art, the former being much more plentiful.