Makin' Copies

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More About

• Marcel Proust
• Molly Springfield
• Plexiglas

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The gallery looks odd, almost empty, as if the curators had forgotten to put up a show. But you notice small, waist-height Plexiglas cases; they seem to hold photocopies, and in a sense, they do. Molly Springfield's conceptual art consists of drawings of photocopies of pages from 28 translations of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She hand-renders everything: the page edges, the copy machine's streaky negative space, and even the notes scribbled in by readers; you wonder whether you're looking or reading. "Translation" is a series of nesting boxes in your mind: You get it, and then you get it, and then you get it some more. The pages are sequential, but since they come from different editions, the story is not. It's Proust, some of the finest prose the world knows — even in translation — so your brain tries to read it. Circling the room at random is the better strategy, and squinting at the delicate pencil marks brings strange joy. Word on the street is that the drawings will someday be made into a book ("stapled into a reader," grouse/quips a former graduate student.) We don't get that part yet.
Feb. 13-March 21, 2009