Ephemerarium

November 18, 2013December 7, 2019

Paradiso

This piece is a sister to Inferno, but celebrates the text with a constellation of gold spots. As with the other books in Dante’s Divine Comedy, circles play a central role in Paradiso (Heaven, or Paradise).

Mrs Dalloway

This diptych was created out of the text of Virginia Woolf’s dazzling short novel, Mrs Dalloway , originally published in London in 1925. The two panels are subtitled View of the Ouse in Daylight (yellow) and View of the Ouse in Moonlight (blue), with daylight referencing Clarissa and moonlight referencing Septimus, two of the central characters/voices of the novel.

Tkhine dish towels

This is a project from last fall, a set of 5 linen dish towels. The towels are screen printed with an 18th century tkhine, a vernacular form of prayer made by Jewish women.

Halo

This piece is an apt summation of my art work of the last couple of years– most of which is born out of deep attachment to and reverence for the book form (arguably the most ingenious, mobile, transferable, humanistic, and renewable technology ever devised).

Kindling the Light

Maccabee’s Candles was created using pages of an English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) formed into candles. It is a gruesome piece that was not easy to make.

Metamorphosis

Here are two pieces using the text of Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis. I started with a bilingual German/English edition (Schocken Books, 1968) so that I wouldn’t loose text on the verso of each page.

Golem

These two panels are joined together in a diptych based on the Jewish story of the Golem. The Golem is a kind of magical creature–a superhuman thug really– molded from clay and animated into life by a rabbi with a supreme command of Jewish law and theology.

The Poetry Cure (Remix)

This piece is a hand-held folly. I’d already butchered pages from this book for an earlier piece (The Poetry Cure, 2008) and had just the excellent cover and most of the text remaining. I am still exploring ways of altering books in such a way as to maintain the cover and shape of the original book object. I like the idea of pieces that fit compactly on a shelf and are admired only “on command.”

The Red Line

Simply folding the pages of this Bible resulted in an elegant, geometric form. The red line itself manifests from the visible leftover edge of the pages which are tinted red and bound in black leather.

Mirror Madonna

On my first trip to Turkey (1990), I collected various ephemera (newspaper clippings, phone cards, ticket stubs, coupons, receipts) during the course of travel.