Dearly Departed

David Mirvish Books has passed over to the other side. The end is now official, and so I give you three final offerings on book related art.

1): Barbara Balfour at Art Metropole


Luminous photographs of themed bookshelves.
Also, for a mere $15, an accordion-fold booklet that documents the 7 prints which constitute the installation. (refer back to on the benefits and virtues of collecting artist books). The booklet does not record the bookshelf titles, but the staff at Art Metropole will cheerfully print them out for you. Do ask: the titles are an explanatory essential to getting the full gist of Balfour's work.

Barbara Balfour: "Ex Libris, 2008"
Yellow Shelf
Writing Shelf
Characters
Doubles
Place and Time (Proust)
Everything
Death Shelf

2): Novel Ideas
: Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
(opening later this week) 7 March 2009 - 31 May 2009.
Featuring works by Adam David Brown, Ian Carr-Harris, Brian Dettmer, Paul de Guzman, Alexandre Itin, Nicholas Jones, Georgia Russell, and Robert The.
This group exhibition--including key works from Oakville Galleries' permanent collection--celebrates a fascination with the bound page and its inclination towards artistic re-interpretation.
Some examples of Adam David Brown's altered books:



3) Book of the Dead of Amen-em-hat
Royal Ontario Museum: Feb 28 to March 10, 2009
The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead has been conserved and will be displayed in its full beauty for the first time in over 2,300 years. It contains a collection of hymns, spells and instructions for the after-life.
Perhaps it also contains some advice for independent bookstores.

David Mirvish Books

Seven days and counting. On February 28, David Mirvish Books will close its doors forever. For 38 years this Toronto bookstore has been the place for books on art, design, architecture and related fields. As independent bookstores often are, it has also been a community hub, a place for surprise encounters with art, books, ideas and people that made you think.

To honour that history, for the next week, posts to this blog will be bookish.

A wonderful Frank Stella has graced David Mirvish Books for years. I hope we will be lucky enough to see it on public display elsewhere in the future.


To visit the David Mirvish Books website, click here.

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Lights

...a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms.

Richard Nicholson's series of photographs and brief essay seems a very appropriate follow-up to the previous posts.

Darkrooms are disappearing. Polaroid film: going, going, gone. Yet, an increasing number of young photographers are interested in working with these analogue technologies. They are intrigued by the hands-on craft of darkroom work: the engagement of all five senses in the art making process. Something similar accounts for the recent resurgence of respect for painting at art schools in this country. Ditto, the massive interest in DIY and "upcycling" amongst young designers. The zeitgeist is evident at the cutting edge of other academic disciplines as well: ideas like "embodied cognition", and the flourishing of research into mirror neuron systems are two examples from cognitive science and neuroscience, respectively. These ideas have taken off in the context of a society-wide paradigm shift in the technologies we use, and in how we think about communication (Web 2.0, for instance). In a recursive fashion, the technology itself has given legitimacy to areas of exploration which previously were considered "infradig". It has become OK in art, and in science, to seriously explore affect, intuition, empathy, and to give the body it's due. Our embrace of digital technology has left more space around the edges for different sorts of creative thinkers, and that is a good thing.

I'll be returning to this theme over the course of future posts. But for now, let me leave you with this thought:

Obsolescence is a terribly over-rated concept.