July 1, 2013; Boston.com

 

NPQ has great admiration for public arts projects that capture the imagination while resonating deeply with the local psyche. In Boston, where orange parking tickets and yellow boots festoon cars, a nonprofit named Unbound Visual Arts has teamed up with artist Ruth Rieffanaugh to exhibit “Parking Ticket Blues & Other Rediscovered Uses,” an exhibition featuring the Boston and Cambridge skylines fashioned out of her own and other people’s tickets, presumably after they had been hurled to the ground. The show will open at the Massachusetts State House on July 10th and will run until July 31st.

Unbound Visual Arts explains the exhibit this way: “After moving to Boston, the artist started receiving several parking tickets and she also found many parking tickets discarded on the streets. In order to capture her feelings and emotions in her new city, she decided to use the tickets to create things of beauty.”

“The parking ticket art, as well as her other artwork, are about ideas, and for Ruth, those ideas emerge as enigmatic imagery,” the statement added. “Drawn from personal experiences, the work grapples with the very personal yet universally personal [sic]—that nameless realm of feelings that blend the passionate and pleasurable, the angst and anguish, the uncertain and unsettled—often evoking a moment in time, a meaningful place, a despairing loss or a sudden discovery.”

Wow. Art, folks!—Ruth McCambridge