The first ever Seattle Art Fair is in the books and by most accounts it's another feather in the cap for the Emerald City. The tech boom with its inherent money showers combined with our proximity to Asia make for an enticing mix and when Paul Allen throws his hat in the ring usually something good happens. I have been saying this for a while now; there are few cities in America as well positioned as Seattle to become one of the leading cities of the 21st century. The show consisted of a healthy mix of local galleries with some of the big boys from...
Susanna Hesselberg’s Underground Library
Every two years on the coast of Denmark the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition takes place. It is the nations largest outdoor exhibition and for this years incarnation 56 site-specific sculptures graced the Danish coast. Among them was Susanna Hesselberg's homage to her father and books: “When My Father Died It Was Like a Whole Library Had Burned Down” (a reference to Laurie Anderson’s song World Without End). Reminiscent of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland the library descends deep underground. With the top sealed and only the page ends visible the library is completely inaccessible. The work powerfully portrays the depth of...
“From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” – Printing Wikipedia for art’s sake
The latest exhibition at the Denny Gallery features a sampling of Michael Mandiberg's wild project called “Print Wikipedia.” Here's the skinny: Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention...
‘Bookfighting’: Art with books gets physical
If you've hung around Book Patrol long enough you know I've got a hankering for the representation of books in art. Now thanks to the French artist Yves Duranthon the relationship between books and art just got a whole lot more physical. It's called 'bookfighting' and earlier this month about 40 people gathered at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to get it on. Think dodgeball in a cage as combatants throw the book at each other trying to score points. And where might such a wild idea come from? Duranthon credits the Japanese writer Yuichi Yokoyama whose novel Combats...
Shredded: The Bookworks of Jukhee Kwon
Libro Libero, 2013 “I destroy books...But actually my work is positive. A discarded book is a dead book. I give it new life.” - Jukhee Kwon For artist Jukhee Kwon, a South Korean working in London, the book is where it all begins. “It’s freedom and excitement for me, trying to express what has been hidden inside the book’s closed covers. The book has its own story, its own energy.” Kwon works only with discarded books, painstakingly and meticulously cutting hundreds of pages to create her new objects. From La Scatola Gallery: The artist notes a personal and cultural narrative within her...