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The Line - 3 Parts
The Line - 3 Parts
The Line - 3 Parts

The Line - 3 Parts

Artist (American, born 1943)
Date2003
MediumBronze rods and shadow
DimensionsTotal for three parts: 60 in. (152.4 cm)
Shadow: variable
a: 3 1/8 × 22 × 3 7/8 in. (7.9 × 55.9 × 9.8 cm)
b: 3 × 16 1/2 × 4 1/4 in. (7.6 × 41.9 × 10.8 cm)
c: 2 1/8 × 20 1/4 × 4 in. (5.4 × 51.4 × 10.2 cm)
ClassificationsSculpture
Credit LineGift of Madelin Coit, 2013
Object number2013.15a-c
DescriptionThree sections of wire bent into script which reads: "The line between sanity and insanity is dedicated green belt not a line crossed with one step."
Text Entries
The artist website, (madelincoit.com), shows the artist believe shadow to be part of the medium.
Santa Fe-based artist Madelin Coit often works with language, humor and irony in her work, often as a strategy of eliciting an emotional response to a poignant circumstance. In the case of The Line, the phrase she rendered in bronze rod, “The line between sanity and insanity is a dedicated greenbelt, not a line crossed with one step,” is at once amusing and poignant. Coit was responding to a friend’s situation of being periodically institutionalized for mental illness. In this statement, Coit uses the metaphor of landscape to speak to the gray areas of psychological well-being, to guide the viewer to visualizing what that precarious position can be for the mentally ill. The piece also speaks to the cyclical return to the social issue of public policy and mental illness, as has been the case in recent decades with the mentally ill and access to guns, for example. Like an echo, the shadow cast by the phrase acts as an insistence to repeat the phrase to oneself and contemplate its meaning and, at the same time, refers to the Jungian concept of the shadow as a negative aspect of the unconscious.
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