Arcadia University Bulletin

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Health Care Bill, 2009 printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches (Photo: theartblog.com)

Arcadia’s Works on Paper has been a tradition since 1972, giving local artists opportunities to submit different types of art, akin only in that they are on paper and that they are juried by a guest curator. The 2009 juror, João Ribas, Curator of Exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass., chose 22 works for the 2009 exhibit at the Arcadia University Art Gallery.

Among the selections, notes Philadelphia’s ArtBlog review, is a 3-inch thick printout called Health Care Bill. Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof write, “The prestigious Works on Paper show at Arcadia raises worthy questions about the value of art objects in the year 2009.” The reviewers continued, the works “raise disturbing questions about the value of all art at a time when works on paper have never been more highly valued….In that same front room, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link offer on a pedestal another conceptual work—Health Care Bill, three inches of Congressional bureaucratese downloaded from the internet and stacked on a pedestal, the work representing value beyond the ability of most of us to calculate. I found it especially amusing that the gallery needed a young woman to stand guard over this particular piece, to make sure no one commandeered a piece of paper from the bill, a piece of paper of questionable value without the context!”

Edith Newhall of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “Ribas left detailed instructions for the installation of his exhibition, too, making it an even more succinct reflection of his sensibility, which seems to favor the minimal, the conceptual, and the quirky. There is more sculpture and less photographic work here than I would have anticipated. Some of the strongest of Ribas’ choices include Andrea Beizer’s drawing Three in Bed, which borrows its style and wit from New Yorker cartoons; Leah Bailis’ Corner, a painted cardboard sculpture of a corner of a clapboard house; Bruce Campbell’s Directional Drawing, in which the words “Live like it is 1968″ are scrawled on paper mounted to board; James Johnson’s 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, a framed silkscreen of sentences on conceptual art by Sol LeWitt, printed on a sheet of 14-karat gold; Mark Stockton’s Composition 3, composed of several drawings of celebrities based on magazine photographs; and Judith Taylor’s photogram, drizzle, capturing water droplets on her car’s windshield.”

Newhall also notes that the show is considered so important to regional artists that “artists whose works were not selected for Works on Paper 2009 and who still have the Arcadia receipt or whose submissions still bear the label that was attached to their work can exhibit at Little Berlin’s Works on Paper Rejects next June. Visit www.littleberlin.org for more information.”