Word: lint
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...year after she turned from oils to lint, Barron was divorced and, she says, happily so. The last stop in the peripatetic life of a military wife was Long Beach, and there she settled in a stucco house with a cedar-shake roof, palms and jacarandas along the street, rosebushes and jasmines running along the fence. From this base she would attain a master's in fine arts, a job teaching at nearby Brooks College and a world of lint. Friends, neighbors, students began to save...
Something broody crept into her work. From flowers, fashioned from lint and showcased in acrylic boxes, came scenes. An intimate birthday party, with a chocolate cake, flowers and candles on the table, two figures seated across from each other, and the artist's comment: "All the romantic items -- the roses and things -- sometimes obscure the other person. There is tension between the people. But it's a birthday! You still observe it. But the food might taste like lint...
From old photographs, Barron chronicled her family with lint portraits, and the results in some instances are haunting. Stand back, and there is a vibrant wedding party, the artist in the middle as a young flower girl; look close, and there is a jungle of fibers that came from the cuffs on your least favorite trousers. She has done four studies of her aged mother, who has been ravaged by Alzheimer's disease. In one there is a woman toddling along in a jogging suit, and in another there is a bent-down crone who has lost her mind...
Occasionally Barron creates whole lint rooms, or "conceptual environmentals," or simply, as she often puts it, installations. One of the most intriguing was called Six o'Clock News. Its inspiration: "I would visit my parents, and they would be watching the news, not knowing what was going on, just sitting there with the TV, lost." It is an 18-ft. by 27-ft. room -- in all, enough lint to fill a U-Haul van, ceiling to floor, which it does. It is like one of those Koren cartoons in The New Yorker -- everything and everybody is fuzzy -- except...
...together such a thing, she pastes lint to the furnishings in the room and the wire figures that represent her mother and late father. The worst part of it -- "drudge work," Barron says -- is the floors and walls. A project this size usually exhausts her lint supply...