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Object of the Week

March 17, 2015

As we start the semester, I think it’s important to ground ourselves, to remember what our time away from DePauw taught us about how we want to live, how we need to change in order to progress. Lauren Arnold’s piece Dancing Shadows, extends shadows across the paper, long washes of ink, lithe and knotted at different heights. The visual simplicity of the piece is what takes me, how a few black lines stroked down in silhouette offer up the outline of a being, the entire human encompassed; a physical soul, its connection to the ground on which it is cast.  It was New York Dada which established that the shadow is as important as the original, the structuring of absence, a second dimensional form which can then define the third dimension. The later assertion not only gives rise the question, who is pictured in Arnold’s work, but places the viewer in the piece as the third dimension, the object of Arnold’s casts. The viewer is forced to look at the work, deeply inspect each long edge, before they realize they are the edge cast. If the viewer is the third dimension, what is the fourth? Our minds, the 

possibility of our evolution, the atoms that stray within us as we move forward, our surface transposed each moment we move. This creates a dissociation between the mind and the body of the viewer, an omniscience for examining the self. Arnold forces the viewer into the shape of that which cannot be spoken, must be seen.