Artists celebrate the good old-fashioned book at UMass Hampden Gallery
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There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about the death of the book - the printed book, that is. With the advent of the Nook, the Kindle, the iPad and other devices for storing reading material, the electronic reader might seem like the "book" of the future.
But at the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, artists who are also big fans of reading are celebrating books - the old-fashioned kind - with an exhibit that offers a funny and varied commentary on the rapid evolution of the book as we know it.
In "A Novel Idea," which opened earlier this month and runs through Feb. 18, 2012, 26 artists have folded, bent, collated, mounted and otherwise revamped books of their choice in a display that transforms the printed word to very different mediums. There's the work of Linda Stillman, for instance, an avid gardener who cut, molded and painted the pages of a gardening guide to turn it into a vase. Or China Marks, who scanned a wild array of images, from misshapen heads to flora, onto the pages of a photo essay about Washington, D.C., lobbyists to make a graphic novel called "Weirdsville."
Hampden director Anne LaPrade, co-curator of the show with Northampton artist Sally Curcio, said "A Novel Idea" seemed a perfect fit for what's known as Hampden's "Incubator" gallery, a smaller space where new artistic concepts can be explored. Earlier this year, LaPrade had been speaking to an artist friend in broad terms about doing something with books and had said, "Well, it's not exactly a novel idea," when her friend said, "Oh, is that the title?"
"That's kind of how this was born," said LaPrade in a recent interview at UMass. She enlisted the support of Curcio, whom she knew from past shows, and the two then selected the work of 26 artists, including 15 from the Valley, for the exhibit. Other contributors come from Connecticut, New York and from as far afield as Turkey.
What's particularly appealing to LaPrade is that artists in the exhibit are involved in various fields - painting, sculpting, filmmaking, writing - and their contributions, she said, "are in some cases very, very different than the work they usually do."
Artists were asked to take a book they found significant and reshape it in some manner. "That wasn't an easy thing for some people to do," LaPrade said. "Asking someone to mutilate a book, especially people who really value books, wasn't easy."
But the works in "A Novel Idea" are hardly mutilations. The altered books are above all very funny, with a rich, tactile presentation that in most cases visitors are invited to touch. Northampton sculptor Cynthia Consentino, for instance, has transformed British crime writer Ruth Rendell's novel "Simisola" into a book she dubs "Real Men," which has a muscle-bound male action figure embedded in the front cover and a smaller plastic "dollhouse dad" sunk in the back.
Inside the book, Consentino has whited out sections of the narrative, leaving only small phrases and words having to do with male physiques, emotions and action. The project, she writes in her exhibit notes, was motivated by her desire to "explore and compare male stereotypes in our culture."
Then there's Connecticut artist Zoe Fedorjaczenko, who has made an elaborate fold of the pages of an Emily Dickinson poetry volume, producing a rippling, wave-like effect; suitably, her title is taken from one of Dickinson's poems, "There is no Frigate like a Book." As Fedorjaczenko explains, "Emily Dickinson ... experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints ... In this piece, a book is folded and freed from its conventional restraints."
Fedorjaczenko's daughter, Alexis, a Holyoke poet, has strung together the pages of a poetry volume, "Nox," in a 60-page accordion-style book that swirls overhead and climbs the walls. The idea is to examine the way words and the printed page encompass all aspects of the younger Fedorjaczenko's life, according to LaPrade.
There is also commentary on the effects of electronic media. New York filmmaker Jesse Epstein has taken a copy of the men's magazine Maxim and embedded a small video piece, called "Wet Dreams and False Images," in a display of the scantily clad women the magazine specializes in. Visitors can put on earphones and listen and watch as Epstein interviews computer retouchers, who explain how they digitally alter endless photos of women to give them the picture-perfect look that skin magazines present.
Visual data
On display in Hampden's main gallery is "Mix and Match," a collection of collages curated by Klaus Postler, a collage artist and independent curator. The show features local artists as well as some from more far-flung locales such as New Zealand and Germany.
The exhibit debuted this past summer in a gallery in Bucharest, Romania, based on a contact LaPrade and Postler made a few years ago when they were in Romania during a residency. Postler, a UMass graduate, calls collage "the definitive art form of the 20th century," given its influence on many other forms of art and visual expression, from painting to film - and he'd like to see it get more exposure.
The 12 artists who have contributed pieces to "Mix and Match" were asked to submit work in which the items within the collage were "of roughly equal value," and that goal is generally met, as the collages don't highlight specific items.
In the work of Amherst artist Petula Bloomfield, for instance, the eye is drawn both to the dark, resin-coated background and a host of swirling, colorful images that suggest an underwater milieu. But Bloomfield adds other textures and pictures that compete for attention. In "My Lord, Mylar," there's a large butterfly wing, for instance, and a sidelong view of the pope.
Peter Gordon, who received a bachelor's degree in fine arts from UMass in 2002, explores environmental themes with a combination of acrylic paint, colored pencil and marker on wood panels. In a series he calls "Cap and Trade," he looks at the contradictions between the goal of "going green" within a high energy-use lifestyle. In "Cap and Trade #1," a car is surrounded by dark, spewing smokestacks and a clutch of price tags promising big savings, like "only $15.99." Environmental relief seems a long way away.
As Postler writes in the exhibit notes, "Visual artists engaging in the creation of collage on an ongoing basis are of necessity in dialogue with the incessant flow of visual data that permeates our lives."
"A Novel Idea" and "Mix and Match" will be on view at the Hampden
Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst through Feb. 18,
2012. Regular gallery hours are Mondays through Thursdays from noon to 5
p.m. and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m., but the gallery will be closed from
Wednesday through Jan. 23, 2012, during the university's winter break.
To arrange a private viewing during that time, call Anne LaPrade at
545-0680 or send an email to laprade@acad.umass.edu. Admission is free.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
