Diversity in Artist’s Books from Southern California

Over 30 well-known book artists will show artist’s books that also show their incredible range of subject matter and media, from the intensity of Katherine Ng’s “Spirit Vessel” to recent CAC-award winner Sam Erenberg’s installation “Playboy Reader (in Braille).”

The exhibition will also travel to the Center for Book Arts in New York in 2001.

the book is an object.
the book is a passage.
the book is a place...
to be read or unread.

Out West: SoCALled Books showcases the work of book artists in Southern California, from Bakersfield to San Diego. The diversity of the area adds to the artistic complexity of the work, and these artists work in every field from show biz to aerospace, exploring new forms that “reinvent” the book.

These artworks resemble books in form and, like books, they contain information. But they are more than readable: they continually change and challenge us as we read and handle them and become actively involved with them. These artists allude to a range of documented forms – scroll, clay tablet, girdle book, pop-up book – and they employ a variety of media and materials – pen and ink, photographs, collage, xerography, painting, stamps, fabric, wood, clay, thread. All, however, operate under the dictum that a book must last a thousand years.

As both fine art and sculptural literature, the artist’s book is a vehicle of discovery and as visually challenging as any painting, sculpture or other form of art, both for the creator and the viewer. The main difference is that the artist’s book is manipulatory and the iconography is not seen all at once. The books in this exhibition involved me on diverse visual levels, and I hope you too will be intrigued by the multitude of these artists’ approaches to imagery, structure or deconstruction, and poetry in motion.

—Gloria Helfgott, Curator

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