Crowd Control

On the night of November 16^th artist Bethany Seib invited viewers to contemplate the transitory and temporal nature of life with her stylized re-mapping of humanity in her latest piece, You Are Here. The giclee print is on view in the New Media lab in the Visual Arts Building at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Initially one is struck by the sheer sprawling nature of this biomorphic, cosmic map as well as the intensity of color that literally bursts into what can be described as confetti-esque bits of blues and greens. Layered over this image, one can start to decipher random masses of people corralled by seemingly arbitrary heavy black lines or borders. These lines divide the image into a form that in some areas are geometric in nature and in others whimsical and curvilinear. Each cropped territory shows the uniform physical orientation of the respective crowds without revealing where or why this collective attention is drawn.

From a distance, the underlying, pixilated, explosion of color could be an attempt to recreate the continual and expanding nature of the universe as well as the humanity that thrives within it. However, confusion begins to mount as the viewer considers the variety of formal and conceptual devices used by Seib. The artist has carefully edited out any information that might concretize the meaning behind her aesthetic decisions.

Seib’s editing proves to be a conceptual roadblock as the viewer contemplates the (possibly) fortuitous grouping of these crowds-crowds in the throes of protest, mourning, and celebration. Is the artist trying to communicate how and why humanity groups and defines itself as a whole? If so, Seib’s audience is lost in the lack of formal and conceptual considerations, which might be utilized to communicate her message. That being said, this recent work has proven to be more ambitious than her previous giclee prints and begins to create levels of complexity for the viewer to consider.

Bethany Seib is a graduate student in the School of Visual Arts at The Pennsylvania State University.