Every Story Tells A Picture
By Tom Wachunas
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a
culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury
“From the moment I picked your book up
until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading
it.”
-Grouch Marx
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” –Stephen
King
EXHIBIT: OUT OF PRINT (An Upcycled Exploration of books
and text into configurations of Fine Art), by Pam Neff, at The Little Art
Gallery, THROUGH NOVEMBER 9, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, www.ncantonlibrary.org
How fitting a
location for this show – a gallery in a library. Here is a gathering of 62 pieces by Pam Neff that are
comprised of or derived from recycled (you could say recovered and re-covered)
books. Their pages have been cut, curled, collaged and otherwise coiffed into
images and forms that tantalize in a variety of ways.
Books being what
they are, there is not surprisingly a generous sprinkling of word play at work,
particularly by way of puns and double intenders, so to speak. Generally, the
titles of Neff’s pieces offer easy enough handles for grasping the content/intent
of a piece, or getting the joke as the case may be.
Some of her treatments are quite literal (some
might say cute). Rock Paper Scissors or
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are good
examples. Likewise the titles of her four elegant 3D vignettes of tiny wooden
mannequins attached to open books - their pages fancifully blossoming outward,
origami style - tell the tale: A Real Cliffhanger, Relaxing With a Good
Book, In the Middle of a Good Book, A Real Page Turner. This is certainly
not to say that such works are visually bland or too simplistic.
Neff is an
inventive designer of TEXTures
blended into hybrid, often humorous forms – part sculpture, part picture or
collage – that can tickle the brain. Trike
is a triptych drawing of a tricycle spanning the covers of three books (one
of which with the photo of a boy child and his tricycle) arranged in a triangle
on the wall. But if you look at the titles on the outer binding of the books,
one is “General Ike.” So then a word game might evolve. General Eisenhower’s
tricycle? As in triangle, tricycle, Ike…trike. Get the
picture?
Still, our experience of a given artwork
need not be restricted by its title. A
work’s title isn’t so much an end-all disambiguation, but rather one (and not
the only) plausible pathway to its meaning. The most engaging works here are
those that seem to allow, even encourage free-association with the title and
materials at hand. In that sense, the invigorating undercurrent of this exhibit
is one of unfettered playfulness.
Additionally, the
incorporation of vintage photographs in many of the works delivers a nostalgic
dimensionality – a sense of recalling and perhaps even longing for bygone days.
I left the gallery prompted to all the more savor the memories of being deeply,
personally affected by the people, places and things ARTiculated in books. All
kinds of books. Real books, with
their heft and tactility and very aroma that have the uncanny capacity to
transfix and transform.
And transport.
Neff’s austere floor sculpture, an upright ring of paperbacks titled Out of Circulation, brings to mind the
circular gateway to other worlds featured in the 1997-2011 sci-fi television
series, “Stargate SG-1.” It’s an apt metaphor for how books, opened and read,
might then open us to the possibility
of journeying to alternative planes of being. Birds Nest, with its paper cutout bird (itself a somewhat
unnecessary visual element) nestled on a bed of shredded paper cut from and
into the body of an opened book, is
invested with a similar spirit.
In many ways then,
the entire exhibit is indeed an impressive expansion of this metaphor. Books,
as physical entities, can generate metaphysical experiences. And isn’t that a
hallmark – or bookmark, if you will - of the most satisfying art?
PHOTOS (from top):
Out of Circulation; A Real Cliff Hanger
(left) and A Real Page Turner; Birds
Nest; Trike
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