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Steven Wolf Fine Arts

February 13 - March 22, 2009

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2747 19th Street A San Francisco, CA 94110
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Translation Untitled (page 2), 2008, graphite on paper
Opening reception Friday, February 13, 5:30 – 7:30 pm Panel Discussion Saturday, February 14, 2 pm with Molly Springfield, Stanford professor Joshua Landy, author of Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust and Kriston Capps, a Washington DC-based art critic, reporter, and commentator In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator’s grandmother gives gifts that are meant to instruct. She prefers the old to the new; she harbors a distaste for modernity and the cocksureness of technology. When decorating her grandson’s bedroom, she rejects posters of the Parthenon based on photographs, in favor of posters based on paintings, or posters based on prints after those paintings—anything it seems to complicate the clarity of the image with what Proust called the thickness of art. This way of doing things reads like a primer for the strategy behind Molly Springfield’s new project at Steven Wolf Fine Arts. This February, the young Washington DC-based artist will debut her own “translation” of the overture to Proust’s nearly 100-year-old masterpiece, entirely in the form of drawings. The project consists of 28 individual drawings of photocopies of sequential pages from the first chapter of the book. This patchwork, taken from the different editions and translations, results in the repetition and omission of text from page to page, resolving into an incomplete and not-fully-readable rendition of the original. In the spirit of conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth and John Baldessari, Springfield conflates drawing with writing and seeing with reading. This will be taken to the extreme in the project room, where she will show a suite of drawings based on her own notes on the translation. Eventually all the drawings will be reconstituted as a book with an afterword by the poet Bill Berkson. Photocopies of books have been the primary subject of Springfield’s practice for several years. She’s drawn pages from Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 and other critical texts in which words and images reference the philosophical status of the image. While her drawings reiterate some of these conceptual lessons, they also complicate them by duplicating the image and challenging its authorship. By choosing the words of Proust as her sitters, these investigations specifically enter the realm of time and memory. For just as Proust’s narrative relies on the notion that a memory replaces the original event in crucial ways, Springfield’s drawings question the importance of the original in an age where an image might become potent only after frequent reproduction, transformation and distribution. Like Proust’s narrator, who begins In Search of Lost Time by musing, “I had gone on thinking while I was asleep about what I had been reading but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn,” Springfield takes us through her transcription process to a twilight place where the comfortable solidity of meaning and location breaks down. This is enhanced by stylistic elements in the drawings themselves. They look empirical at first glance, but the nuances of value and abstraction produced by the quirks of the copier machine and the magic of the toner grant them a dark and mysterious air. The center of the drawing channels Lawrence Weiner, the margins Agnes Martin. Technology and the hand collaborate in odd ways. As a book, Translation will be more than a catalogue of the drawings. The ostensible subject becomes Springfield’s claim that we consider her work a viable new translation of Proust. On the wall the drawings are viewed, in book form they are more likely to be read. As rewritten by Springfield, Proust’s familiar words should sound different and signify differently. The reader will have to sort out whether the action in the book takes place in the imaginary village of Combray, in Proust’s cork lined room, in Springfield’s well-lit studio, or the place in which they are reading it. Time is out of joint. Reading is a linear act in which mental presence is required to keep the story moving along; scant attention is paid to the spaces between the words and those along the margins. Looking at images can require the same concentration but allowance is made for the mind to wander and dream. Springfield’s Translation is a bridge between these two activities. In her work we are always going back and forth. Springfield received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at Mireille Mosler, Ltd., New York; Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco; and Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago, as well as group shows at galleries and museums in New York, London, Berlin, Miami, and Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers, The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post. She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2006 and was awarded a DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for 2009.