The notes in the catalogue for this exhibition are pretty good and so here they are:
The Chambers's English Dictionary - perfect bound with 1255 numbered pages, printed in London, 1898, bought by a friend for $20 in a second hand bookstore is an edition that now has the aura of a unique object. Signs of use and accident - stains and tears, jottings and yellow-edged pages - mark the book as integral with its material history, suggesting a world in which the reference book is now an artifact of wisdom. A communal archive of shared knowledge, symbolic of the library and its holdings, the lexicon bears witness to old belief systems still functioning through language.
The intimate boundaries of its form - finitude and sequence, repetition and extension - provide the spatial gestalt for the exhibition. Dismantled and reconstrued, its integrative internal structure sits like a collaged landscape of language. A found poem - an arbitrary gesture in the rooms of a bibliotech - the 'absent text' of the dictionary is now playfully rendered in textual, visual and material manipulations of the original pages.
Artists respond to the codified formal elements of the page - margin, gutter, type, text block, illustration, running head... and to the binarism of black ink on white paper. But words seep through, along with their labyrinthine associations. There is a tension between the literal and conceptual page as artists play with the sonoric and visual aspects of language that form part of the substance of the dictionary substrate.
In other words, about 50 artists each given a double page from said 1898 edition of Chambers's and given licence to create art incorporating that page as they saw fit - interesting concept, and I enjoyed the exhibition. Jade T spotted it and I went with her and, perhaps a bit surprisingly, by and large our favourites were similar. The ones I particularly liked (pretty much in order):
• Presence de l'Absence - Considering Blanchot II (Tara Gilbee). Well, with a name like that...in fact, it is a neat spin on Blanchot, words and phrases craftily cut out from the page and raised on pins to spell out a text about the nature of the dictionary (text) itself, thereby enacting the presence/absence thing. Also liked the materiality/substantiality of the red/maroon thread dangling from the pins (reminiscent of if not actually from the binding of a dictionary of the time).
• Contents (Louise Rippert). Cute little book shelvesque. And, I suppose, hints at infinity, too.
• O (Annee Miron). Paper folded into little boxes, filled with ash. Immediately attractive and seemingly immediately obvious, but holds the mind afterwards...
• OO (Anna Finlayson). Most of the words blacked out with a marker pen, to leave only "ou"s, "woo"s and maybe some "oo"s and "o"s as well. I don't really know why I liked this one so much, but I was thinking while looking at it that the appeal had something to do with the way it seemed somehow retarded, and gleefully so (and you know that I'd only use a phrase like that, even in my head, with great care); I just realised that that association came from the panel in Ghost World where Enid and Rebecca are looking at the sidewalk slab where a little kid has written his name over and over and one comments about how they love the way that it's so retarded and egomaniacal...but OO isn't egomaniacal - it's all about the "woo". Excellent whichever way you look at it.
• Reliquary (Sandra Bruce). It says "reliquary", and it is one, just as it gestures at its surrounds as also being so; a bit "ceci n'est pas une pipe", then. Looks nice, too.
