Title: Seven
Artist: Carole Turner
Symposium: “Perspective” September 2016
Media: Welded Steel
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Map Location: #84
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“SEVEN”
“The Rule of Seven” is an old marketing adage — that after a person sees or hears a message seven times it sinks in, And the receiver will be much more likely to believe that message and act upon it.
Ideas related to memory and transformation often recur in my work, and for the past few years, I have combined these themes in a group of “Voices” sculptures concerned with the words and images that we are inundated with over a lifetime. How we process those voices, how much importance we assign, and how long we retain the input informs and forms who we become.
From infancy we are molded by the voices we hear and the actions of others, and their reactions to our words and our actions. Along with human interactions, television and advertising played a big role in many of our formative years, subjecting us to subtle, and not so subtle, manipulations to process as well. All of those voices and video clips stay with us, buried in our psyches – some near the surface, and others buried deeper, but instantly accessible with unexpected triggers.
This sculpture, “Seven,” is a tower of seven televisions. Each television screen is filled with indestructible black steel audio/video tapes, which represent all of the voices that form our personal soundtracks, always ready for playback, whether we like it or not. The televisions that deliver them are a metaphor for the various sources of those tapes.
The televisions are made of weathering steel that will decay with rust. The black tapes will remain as new and outlast their messengers.