Created for the School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island, FREEZE takes the form of a room-wrapping text stream featuring 125 who questions drawn from student publications spanning the University’s 125-year history. The artwork’s multilayered volley of questions stands in response to a type of text frieze common to academic architecture, which displays the words of cultural giants like Aristotle, Einstein and Shakespeare in the ‘eternal’ substance of stone. The purpose of these classical messaging devices is to impart to the viewer an elevating sense of permanence, stability and continuity.
In contrast, FREEZE presents a cross-generational cacophony of anonymous student voices raised in question, set in the perishable material of wood, and framed in the relentlessly disjointed form of a news crawl. Stepping off from one of the “five w’s” (who, what, where, why, when) considered basic in information gathering, the artwork uses its multiplicity of voices, and the multiplicity of topics they address, to evoke the essential instability of information as we receive it via the digital landscape, and to ask its audience of future media and communications professionals who will make sense of it all. FREEZE’s barrage of all-caps, vernacular epigrams looks to its classical predecessor to engage our contemporary world of texts, blogs, tweets, snapchats and 24-hour news: a world where nothing stands still long enough to be carved in stone.
AREA C collected content from the following sources to create FREEZE's text crawl:
● The Beacon (student newspaper, 1880s to 1970s)
● The Good 5-Cent Cigar (student newspaper, 1970s to present)
● The Great Swamp Gazette (student publication, 1970s)
● Black Gold (student publication, 1973-74)
● The Grist (yearbook, 1890s to 1970s)
● The Renaissance (yearbook, 1970s to present)
● URI student organization social media sites
Commissioned by the the RI State Council on the Arts through the Art In Public Facilities Act.
MEDIA: Laser cut Baltic birch plywood, glass, text fragments from URI student publications
DIMENSIONS: 7'H x 71'W x 2"D
YEAR: March 2018
LOCATION:
Ranger Hall
Harrington School of Communication + Media
University of Rhode Island
Upper College Road . Kingston, RI 02881
COMMISSIONING AGENCY: Rhode Island State Council on the Arts
ARTIST: Erik Carlson and Erica Carpenter
INTERN: Nick Hollibaugh / Box Elder Studio
LASER CUTTING: Precision Laser, Providence, RI
Copyright © Erik Carlson 2018
https://www.areacprojects.com/
