Then

Suzanne McClelland believes that the emotional nuance of the spoken word is frequently missing from printed texts. Her vigorous gestures and repetitions counter this tendency, forcing the written word to perform like its spoken form and meaning. Here, McClelland draws layers of images on a page from The New York Times to obscure or reveal portions of the underlying surface. She relishes the accidental meanings found in the absurd juxtapositions of news articles with advertisements. According to the artist, the print's title--Then--written backwards across the composition, "…has something about it that relates to the newspaper for me because it has a lot to do with permanence. 'Then' is always something that happened before and somewhere else."