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Image of Mary A

Mitchell Syrop

American, b. 1953

Mary A
1992

Photocopies, aluminum, monofilament, and Foamcor
in. (cm)
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1996.41

In Mary A thirty-nine different faces smile at us from enlarged copies of their yearbook portraits, which hang in broken rows. All of the women are Caucasian, and most have straight, dark hair. An older woman appears at the top of the pyramidal grouping, and another along the right edge, as if they are chaperones guarding the order of this assembly. Is “Mary A” the name of the first subject in the sequence, or the artist’s designation of generic, everywoman status to each member of this collection of souls?

Syrop began making yearbook portrait installations in 1974 as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute. He has returned to the format multiple times, varying the scale and configuration of each piece. Some of the works use only a few of the pictures (black-and-white and color) he has culled from late-sixties-to-mid-eighties yearbooks, church directories, and the like; others use hundreds. Every one of them assumes the shape of an incomplete grid, its gaps calling attention to the constructed nature of the arrangement. Archives, these installations suggest, are inescapably subjective, unfixed in both form and meaning.

Earning his MFA in 1978 from the California Institute of the Arts, a hotbed of conceptualism, Syrop has made a career out of engineering ambiguity. Like Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari in this regard, he disturbs the logic of conventional modes of classification and presentation, exposing the unreliability of mass communication. His work is rich in visual/verbal play, and he often turns common phrases or the idioms of advertising toward inexplicit ends, for instance pairing (in a series of 1984 prints) the slogan “Lift and Separate” with photographs of a canopy bed, a lunch pail, and a rocket launch. Friction born of incongruity between words and images animates much of Syrop’s enterprise, slippage invoked by defamiliarizing the familiar. Mary A wryly poses a challenge: What, really, are we seeing? Why does it look the way it looks? Why won’t its meaning stay still?

Leah Ollman

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