Art: Books take on a new life in 'Art Unbound IV'
The Carnegie Gallery, that gem of an art space on the second floor of the ColumbusMetropolitan Main Library, has a perfectly suited exhibit.
Curator Stephanie Rond invited 25 artists to create works that both comment on the purpose of books in human life and use books themselves as their art materials. Clipping and incorporating pages and lines of text and using book spines and covers – all from withdrawn library materials that were destined to be recycled – the artists created clever, individualistic and thought-provoking works.
The first of the “Art Unbound” exhibits came about when Rond brainstormed with two library officials – Chuck Cody, fine arts manager, and Lara Oliver, Friends of the Library board president.
“All three of us had/have strong sustainability practices and loved the idea of library books taking on new life in a new narrative,” Rond said.
The various incarnations of the exhibit have celebrated library events, including in 2016, when the renovated Main Library reopened, and this year, in early April, when the library hosted the national Public Library Association Conference.
This year’s invited artists are all Ohioans and mostly based in Columbus. The importance of literature and reading are foremost in their works and many of them address the theme of book banning.
Lisa McLymont’s “Dear God: Unite Us Against Book Bans” is a portrait of a woman holding an open book which pages read “Lead us to unite against banned books. Nothing but death will keep us from knowledge.”
In her collage portrait, “The Light of Truth,” April Sunami honors the truth-telling devotion of investigative journalist Ida B. Wells.
Michael Bush used pages from J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” an oft-banned book, for his abstract painted collage “Love Holden” that spotlights one of the novel’s themes: the superficiality of society.
From a furiously penciled and yellow-highlighted copy of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Cat Sheridan created a bulbous vessel. Pregnant women in red capes and white hats circle the vase under the all-seeing "Eyes" at the vessel’s lip.
Char Norman used pages from politically charged texts to create pulp that she used in molds, creating a field of stones. “Crawl Out from Under Your Rock,” she titled the piece, describing it as a metaphor for “suppressed ideas, stoning, as well as steppingstones to freedom.”
The “Study for Ishmael + Queequeg” by John Lauer is a striking sculpture of a head made from crossed-out text from “Moby Dick” and referring to the loving relationship between the novel’s narrator and the Pacific Islander.
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There is so much more in this remarkable exhibit ? Chaz O’Neil’s shining “Tesseract – LastSupper,” a mixed-media-on-panel piece inspired by the film “Interstellar”; Janet George’s “Belonging Through Books,” a collage that recalls her childhood longing to find characters that looked like her; Leah Wong’s gorgeous “Frequency Within” in which miniscule musical notes travel across the piece in waves; and the large, multimedia college “The Book of Grace: Water and Our Human Cargo Ecosystem on Dry Land,” made by Richard Duarte Brown and Ezse Fuller.
Each piece is accompanied by a panel that describes the artist’s materials and thematic intensions. As no two books are alike, so too are all these works unique. Each artist has produced a visual sonnet to books, literacy and freedom.
At a glance
“Art Unbound IV” continues through July 26 in the Carnegie Gallery of the Main Library ofthe Columbus Metropolitan Library system, 96 S. Grant Ave.
Hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, visit columbuslibrary.org.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 'Art Unbound IV' features literary pages in new forms