Plot - unbound book
1999
Plot (plot) n. 1. a: a small piece of ground, generally used for a specific purpose. b: a measured area of land; 2: A ground plan; as for a building; chart; diagram. 3: A series of events consisting of an outline of the action of a narrative or a drama. 4: a secret plan to accomplish a hostile or illegal purpose; scheme. 5: to represent graphically , as on a chart. a graphic representation.
-The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
In Autumn, 1997, Suzanne McClelland arranged with friends to bury four of her large, recently completed drawings on canvas. The burials were widely dispersed in locations around the United States: near East Hampton, New York; Indianola, Washington; Playa del Rey, California and Stuart, Florida. She requested that these interments be videotaped, the tapes sent to her and that the canvases be buried in the Fall and left until the Spring.
No other instructions were given. The volunteers at each site directed, acted, framed, and conceived their own burial ceremonies. They chose the locations and times to bury the canvases. During the Spring and Summer of 1998, McClelland traveled to each of the sites, exhumed the canvases and examined them to see how the climate had effected the drawings. This is a portfolio of images and information documenting this on-going project of interment, exhumation and retrieval of images.
Enclosed are nine digital print images selected from the documentary videotapes of the burials (three images each from the California, New York and Washington sites-there is no documentation of the Florida burial). Also enclosed is a tracing of a "blind" map drawing; three clear film "transcripts" (lists of sounds and words compiled by McClelland after making audio tapes from the video soundtracks); and three etched "reference documents" including a dictionary definition of the word plot, a list of words and phases, some of which appeared in the original canvas drawings and a colophon page which gives facts pertaining to the portfolio's publication.
