Think Before You Shred

Think your bedroom is a safe and secure place?

Rockville artist Jacqui Crocetta questions this assumption through a collaborative installation that turns news headlines into digest. On view at the Mansion at Strathmore through Aug. 18, Crocetta and Veronica Szalus's "Out of Context/Close to Home" re-examines comfort and exposure.

The installation consists of shredded personal documents and alarming newspaper headline cutouts stuffed into wire mesh to simulate the softest and most intimate objects in a bedroom - pillows and comforters.

Emulating a TV's neon glow, blue light emanates from a corner of the room. Ironically, it is produced by a home security lighting system.

Draped across the floor of the Mansion's gallery and shouting "The End Is Near," and "Social Networks Raise Workplace IT Worries," the bedroom pieces invade personal space, intensifying information expsosure and privacy-related anxieties.

"I feel the energy of all the information even though it's been shredded," said Crocetta who enlisted the services of Rockville-based Patriot Shredding for the massive undertaking and got into the nitty gritty of shredding grades.

"For the pillows we chose IRS-grade shredding for aesthetic reasons," she said. The information on the pieces of paper is just legible.

She is concerned about the way security devices infringe upon civil liberties, citing invasive body scans, cell phone tracking and workplace IT monitoring as problematic.

"When people feel that their safety/security is threatened they are more willing to compromise civil liberties. Fear is a powerful motivator," she said.

"Zombies want to eat you - want to know why?" is her favorite headline in the mix because it adds levity, she said.

Also on view at Strathmore are works from the artist's "Protect.Nurture.Release" series, which mediates between the act of nurturing an object, idea or person and then releasing it into the world.

The fragility of her twig sculpture, "Tender," which resembles an empty nest, and the cocoon she builds around an assemblage of spheres symbolizing ideas for writing books, express the tension of interior and exterior personal negotiations.

Crocetta's works are part of "Inform/Re-form," a multimedia group exhibit curated by Harriet Lesser and featuring the mixed-media work of Laurie Brown, Jacqui Crocetta, Catherine Kleeman, Virginia Spiegel and Veronica Szalus. The exhibit showcases quilts, sculptures and paintings created from materials that have been transformed or repurposed from their original context.

Gallery hours at the Mansion at Strathmore are:

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Wednesday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.

Saturday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.