Donna Maria deCreeft

While looking through the Center for Design’s website I came across the work of an artist named Donna Maria deCreeft from New York City. The piece of her work that I decided to write about is a piece called “Document Book” it is in a traveling show called “Show your documents please.” When I first saw the piece with its title I first only thought of a passport or simple identification card. But as you look at her work, there are clips and other attachments that add so much more to a simple document to show how complex we are as humans and what we carry with us all the time. I also think it says to how the things we carry with us define and shape who we are, or at least in the eyes of those who look at us.

 I think initially her piece denotes that we must always be showing identification as we travel but then it connotes that we are so much more than a piece of paper with our name and information on it. I think the piece speaks to how we might see ourselves and how others perceive us.

In order to make sense of the work I think you need to be able to look critically at it and really investigate all of the pieces and find the meaning of them. There is a drawing of DNA, another one of earth, a picture of an eye, and one of a labeled brain. I think that I thought about how all of these things made up this person that deCreeft was trying to represent in this document. 

While I wasn’t able to find any professional critic of her work, her fans really appreciate how deCreeft is able to create very abstract things and really do things unimaginable for most of us. Looking at her work I can appreciate how she really challenges her audience to look at things from a variety of angles.