Traffic Zone Gallery presents a unique exhibition of artwork by 14 prominent contemporary artists from the United States, England, and Germany.
X LIBRIS: The Re-Purposed Book re-imagines the book and the printed page as it is deconstructed, reexamined, reconsidered, reconstructed, reinvented, repurposed.
The exhibition is curated by Harriet Bart, Dennis Michael Jon, and Lisa Nankivil.
Gallery Installation
September 1 - October 15, 2009
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday, 9-5
Opening Reception Saturday September 12, 6-9 pm
Poetry Reading in the Gallery
Tuesday September 22, 7 pm
A reading in the gallery by poet Eric Lorberer
Reception to follow
Artists in the exhibition
Philip Barber – Minneapolis
Harriet Bart - Minneapolis
Doug Beube - New York City
Megan Greene - Chicago
Scott Helmes - St. Paul
Helmut Löhr - Santa Fe & Düsseldorf, Germany
Wolfgang Nieblich - Berlin, Germany
Wilber "Chip" Schilling - Minneapolis
Buzz Spector - St Louis
Molly Springfield - Washington, D.C.
Sarah Stengle - Princeton, N.J.
Jill Sylvia - San Francisco
Marshall Weber - New York City
Sam Winston – London, England
Philip Barber reclaims old book covers from long forgotten novels or discarded college textbooks. Using them as readymade canvases, he paints and draws lyrical compositions that typically allude to the book’s title or contents, revealing unexpected associations and meanings. Combining both abstract and representational elements, his work is generally intimate in scale and poetic in mood, but evinces a nuanced wit and intelligence.
Sculptor and book artist Harriet Bart alters and transforms books and timeworn artifacts into three-dimensional works of art that display a distinctive formal restraint. Her works are conceptually nuanced, evoking both personal memories and fresh meaning.
Doug Beube excavates the essential form of the book through piercing, gouging, and cutting of material, changing how a book functions. For Beube, the endeavor is one of exploration and discovery, a phenomenological experience that brings to light previously unrecognized connections between structure and meaning.
Megan Greene appropriates naturalist studies and various images of flora and fauna as her source material. She then invents fantastical montages of animal and plant forms, reanimated through painting, drawing, and collage.
Artist and poet Scott Helmes uses the English language—form, meaning, and textural organization—as a platform for artistic expression. Through the manipulation of printed text and letterforms, he engages the viewer in a poetic dialogue that reaches beyond the verbal.
Helmut Löhr is a visual poet who disrupts the formal unity of books and book pages. Through cutting, tearing, and folding, he deconstructs the book, then manipulates and reassembles the residual parts into elegant abstract low-relief sculptures.
Set designer, sculptor and book artist Wolfgang Nieblich addresses the fundamental nature and function of books in his art. He recontextualizes the book and its meaning through metaphor, irony, and unexpected associations.
Book designer and typographer Chip Schilling reinterprets historical texts and images by contrasting the literal with the conceptual, in the process discovering new and sometimes unexpected meanings in these intentional juxtapositions.
Artist, writer, and critic Buzz Spector works in a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts and installation. He has used books in his art since 1979, both as subject and as object. Much of his work is conceptually based and relies on extricating the book from its usual context to form new meanings, associations, and experiences. His work also addresses the relationships among public history, individual memory, and perception.
Molly Springfield explores the nature of perception in her work. With painstaking attention to detail, she draws freehand the photocopied pages of printed books, exploring the conceptual dialectics that arise from such oppositions as reproduction and originality, seeing and reading, and technology and labor.
Sarah Stengle prefers to begin her work in response to something that already exists, such as pages from old science books, stained antique papers, or other found objects with iconographic or connotative qualities. Her work exploits the tensions that exist between the abstract and the psychological elements of her images.
Jill Sylvia takes a different, but equally painstaking approach in her work. Using old accounting ledgers as a starting point, she meticulously cuts out the individual entries in the columns of a ledger page with a hobbyist’s knife, giving rise to a striking lace-like structure whose elegance belies its humble origin. In turn, she recycles the assortment of paper "chads" resulting from her cutwork into evocative collaged abstractions.
Marshall Weber explores the everyday objects and images of our cultural and personal histories. With an astute understanding of the subversive power of images, he reconfigures discarded or forgotten materials to reveal the inherent lessons hidden in these relics.
Sam Winston relies on text and typeface as his primary means of expression. His raw materials are the letters, words, sentences, and pages extracted from books and other printed matter, ranging from the historical to the mundane. With a focus on their conceptual and structural origins, he reorganizes these texts and text fragments to produce collages and original prints of striking originality and elegance.
Harriet Bart
Ledger Domain 1
31" x 17" x 12"
found objects
Helmut Löhr
When I Dream
19" x 19"
collage
Wolfgang Nieblich
The Painter's Book
15" x 11" x 1"
painted book
Wilber "Chip" Schilling
Letter
8" x 10.5"
altered pages
Sarah Stengle
Inner Vault
7" x 10"
watercolor, pencil, found page
