Situations

Begats and Begets, Jennifer Hibbard

MCBA opened a new show in its gallery two weeks ago, entitled Situations, an exhibition of book-inspired installation art, and I think it's one of my favorite exhibits that the center has done. MCBA Artistic Director, Jeff Rathermel, writes the following to explain these wonderful installations and their relationship to book art: "All (of these) works have content: they tell a story, express an idea, or speak of art traditions. Each has a narrative to be interpreted by viewers/readers. Each work is contained, either physically or allegorically. Whether elements are "bound" by a set of rafters or unified in a bowl, the space of each piece is defined. Drawers become pages, cabinets function as covers, pins serve to bind and walls evolve into spines."
I've always been drawn to book work that uses nontraditional materials to tell a story, and particularly when I'm invited into the work to do my own explorations. The centerpiece of this exhibit is the cabinet/collaboration Hand-to-Hand.
54 artists were invited to take a drawer and create a visual narrative on the them of "hands." Each drawer is labeled with the title and you can gently open it yourself to reveal what is inside. If a drawer has a metal hand on the outside, you can actually manipulate the contents yourself.

Nora McGillvray's drawer with the text, "A book should be a ball of light in one's hand." A drawer with Kathleen Richert's On the One Hand (closed)

and open....the plexiglass hands slide to create different visual pages.

Alice Austin's Red, Yellow and Blue is a wall installation made up of 49 prints of the same book.

There are 14 works throughout the center. It was only when I got home that I realized that I had missed two that are in the lower level press area and one that was in the paper studio. The exhibition runs through the end of April, which gives me time to go hunt the missed works out as well as to explore more of the drawers in Hand-to-Hand.