Kelly Writers House Art Gallery
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In conjunction with "The Library is Burning: Text, Image, Object 1963-2005", an exhibition by Osvaldo Romberg, University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia (April 7 -- June 7, 2006). Curated by Aaron Levy.
These object-books were born from the collaboration between a visual artist and a writer who both wanted to question the traditional opacity of books. By a pun that collapses transparency (diaphorism) and the literary or philosophical aphorism, these three-dimensional hand-made artifacts include fragments of texts in a playful Wunderkammer. There, fossils, insects, and pebbles testify to the materiality of the word. The plastic pages cannot be cut but unfolded and function as folds, curtains, textured veils trembling and shimmering in a changing light. These arresting books call up the visual palimpsests of our layered lives. The raw natural history that we would discover as children in school meets the verbal utopia of one-liners condensing individual fate in mundane objects elevated to art. |
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