Ally's SMP - Imprints

I went to Ally’s SMP presentation with a few ideas in mind of what it had to do with because I had heard about a lot of the preparatory works she was doing. I also went to the gallery opening to see if I what I got from the work would be what she talked about during her presentation.
Her final works use the image of a fingerprint mainly. She talked about how people leave imprints everywhere they go, connecting unknowingly with strangers through shared spaces and objects. That is probably one of the most basic things to say about her pieces, but it is what struck me the most. She chose the fingerprint because it is the “physical manifestation of where we’ve been.” I am mainly going to talk about her hanging installation. She made six large pieces on Plexiglas with a simplified drawing of a fingerprint on each. She used black and white paint as well as cutting out shapes and used bubble wrap to add texture on some. All of them are graphic pieces on their own, but what is interesting about them to me is the way they are hung. Because they are hung in a way that you could walk through them from any area and because they are transparent, the viewer gets the sense of going on their own path while overlapping with others. Even the fingerprints themselves can overlap, but they are never touching. This is the same as how strangers lives can overlap or not, but the people never actually meet. [My favorite part of her presentation is when she talked about the day she spent taking pictures of everyone who went to the same gas pump.]

I don’t have really anything to say in terms of how to improve her work. I would enjoy seeing some of the projects she did throughout the year, like Letters to Someone, incorporated into a work she would do. I guess that would make it more personal to her and be about how she connected (imprinted) with all of these people through her study of other peoples lives.