Book
Book is an exhibition of artwork based on a relationship to books. Some works are inspired by important pieces of fiction, while others explore harsh realities or focus on the book as an object. In each case the distinct vision of each artist examines how a gallery environment engages with the significance of the act of reading and recording in all its connotations.
Collaborators Todd Slaughter and Melissa Yes present the work “Stars Falling” in which they use Atticus Finch, “the hero of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird– as a pathway into conversations exploring complex legacies and moral anxieties. They reflect on Lee’s later novel, Go Set a Watchman, which reimagines Atticus as a white supremacist, offering an alternative perspective on the character. The novels along with this work reveal and explore tensions in American identity and morality, and the tension created when we are disappointed in something we love, whether that is a family member, a leader, or a place.
Justin Sorensen adapts, dissects, and disrupts traditional structures of literature, language, and books. His work explores time, religion, technology, and literature. For Book, Sorensen reimagines text and the book’s format as materials to be dispersed and destabilized. Jack _____ uses a search engine to generate imagery, questioning the contemporary reliance on Google for exploration. Poem plays on both magnetic poetry and Dada poetry, with magnets designed to be removed from the gallery and placed on cars, creating new compositions from existing poems and The Snow Leopard chronicles a search that elevates the unnoteworthy and immediate to something epic.
Migiwa Orimo’s installation The Day Before Tomorrow: Sites and Footprints of ICE Detention Centers was inspired by the U.S. government’s family separation immigration policy. This work maps the footprints of 154 ICE detention centers using Google Maps’ bird’s-eye views, presenting them as dark voids on pages from A Dictionary of the Underworld. Hand-painted birds and zines on immigrant detention accompany the piece. Meanwhile, Loose Leaf draws on notions of margins and peripherals to explore unaddressed spaces within books.
Kent Rhodebeck approaches the book from the outside, focusing on its structure. His Book objects series is rooted in a durational relationship with homemade, hand-bound sketchbooks and journals. These pieces serve as containers for collages, found materials, and carved marks, capturing a playful interaction with different materials that reflect touch, wear, and usage. By “laying flat” these books, Rhodebeck pushes them beyond their functional purpose, transforming them into objects to ponder.
Mark Harris’s video work examines colonial botanical literature of the 18th-century Caribbean, such as Hans Sloane’s Voyage to Jamaica and Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. These works highlight instances where European botanists relied on indigenous or enslaved knowledge for their research. Harris incorporates vinyl prints to combine imagery from books on the 1848 Paris uprising with repainted graffiti from the 1968 Paris demonstrations.
Books hold our memories, histories both personal and collective– becoming a pin in time and place- yet as time passes they slip, their meanings change in ways we can not always foresee.
Featuring:
Todd Slaughter | Melissa Yes | Justin Sorensen | Mark Harris | Migiwa Orimo | Kent Rhodebeck |