Books to be Looked at and/or Objects to be Read
A Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition
Max L Gatov Gallery
California State University, Long Beach
Opening Reception: Sunday May 4, 5-7pm
May 4-8, 2008
Hours: Mon-Thurs 12-5pm, Wed 12-7pm
For directions and parking information go to www.art.csulb.edu/directions/index.php
The exhibition, Books to be Looked at and/or Objects to be Read, includes sculptural, traditional hand bound, and digital offset books that investigate issues of form, content, word, and image.
The sculptural works use found books as their content, cut up and rebound into new forms using manipulated versions of traditional bindings and exaggerated shapes and proportions. Encyclopedic is made from an entire set of encyclopedia bound into a single meandering form. These are sensual objects no longer meant to be read from cover to cover but seen as an immediate and cohesive whole. The hand bound books are often language based with found text that is fragmented and rearranged. By shifting the placement and ordering of the words a rhythm is generated that draws you through the book, creating poetry out of the otherwise mundane. The digital offset books play on the history of book art referencing work by artists such as Ed Ruscha and Dieter Roth.
This exhibition challenges the notion that books are to be read and objects are to be looked at. These books are more than just containers for information as their essential physical qualities take on ever more prevalence and meaning. In the end, the books are objects and the objects are books.
