Didi Lin
Didi Lin

Jared Ferguson, Randy Grskovic, Andrea Juby, Didi Lin, Matt McGale, Heidi Nagtegaal, Karen Ngan, Peggy Ngan and Gary Wang
It Doesn’t Add Up

July 3rd – 31st, 2004
Opening Friday July 2nd @ 7pm
Curated by Katie Brennan as a part of the ECIAD student CO-OP program

It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no connection; it’s disjointed and incoherent. Sometimes art leaves the viewer at a loss, unsure about what they are observing. One can attempt to add up all the parts that make up a piece, from those that are of formal and aesthetic concerns to narrative and more academic concerns, but an answer won’t be found. For whatever reason part A and part B don’t lead you to part C as expected; instead, the result is part Y.

Art has this marvelous ability to create and lead the viewer through alternative experiences and thought processes, where situations based on expectations disintegrate to reveal new ideas and meaning. This is an aspect of art that I intend to examine in the exhibit It Doesn’t Add Up at the Helen Pitt Gallery.

The works in It Doesn’t Add Up will deal with the semiotics of art, specifically the intentional disruption of the normative structures contemporary art has led us to expect. In the gallery an appearance of meeting expectations of the viewer will be created, only to be dispelled by further investigation by the viewer. This will draw attention to the gap between the viewers’ expectations and the artists’ intentions; a space where a series of steps are set in place by the artist can yield new meaning and give the viewer access to another level of comprehension. This space will be acted out and read differently by by each viewer as they will come with their own embodied knowledge to the work. Some will be thrown off by the disconnect the work presents and others will have no problem with the disconnect, adding up the work to discover a new meaning.