Installation with Interior view
Ex Libris is a series of small-scale installations in very confined spaces. The series emerges out of the contemporary technological movement from text-based to visual/digital-based cultural transmission. In this work text and a visual vocabulary are brought together. What was a readable book becomes a closed container. Original text becomes context for a series of visual daydreams.
In these works the original has been removed and replaced with found objects and images. The space is sealed. Access to the inner space is through a viewfinder inserted in the spine. The book is mounted on a reverse lectern. The interior is illuminated by a lamp. The original text, the body of the book, is preserved under plexi-glas next to the lectern
Talking about my work, Ex Libris: La Divina Comedia at the Contemporary Venice show in the Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello, Venice, Italy July 15-Aug. 5, 2022
EX LIBRIS: AN INTIMATE IMMENSITY
A series of small, intimate installations inside old books.
an “intimate immensity” is a phrase Gaston Bachélard used, in “The Poetics of Space”, to convey a certain quality to daydreaming that
“…transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity…In analysing images of immensity, we should realise within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination.”…. “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.”
It is this sense of expansion, of enlarged space, of being elsewhere that these intimate works from Ex Libris attempt to evoke when we take a moment to remain motionless and peer into a world of pure imagination.
To view each work click on an image below.