Tag: books

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer: Book Sculpture

For years, Atlanta-based Brian Dettmer has made fascinatingly original sculptures in which he contorts, bends, glues and manipulates old books, creating strange new forms from these familiar objects. Using the sharp cutting implements of a surgeon — Dettmer cuts into the depths of these vintage tomes, revealing themes and variations like some graduate student teasing a dissertation out of English literature. In doing so, the artist chooses to isolate key images and words amidst a fracas of information.

Matthew Brookes

Matthew Brookes, “Les Danseurs” with Introduction by Marie-Agnes Gillot, Published by Damiani, 2015

For his first book, photographer Matthew Brookes has turned his lens upon the professional male ballet dancers of Paris. Over the course of a year, he took these dancers out of their regular environment of rehearsals and performances and photographed them in a raw space in which they were allowed to explore the physicality of dance in its purest form.

This series of portraits depicts the dancers’ responses upon being asked to interpret birds falling from the sky. The introduction is by Parisian prima ballerina Marie-Agnès Gillot, who has worked with these dancers over the years and watched them grow and develop. Brookes was born in England, grew up in South Africa, and is presently based between Paris and New York.

Guy Laramee

Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee

Montreal-based artist Guy Laramie recently unveiled a new body of sculptural work, highlighting his evolving ability to excavate mountainous landscapes, cavernous hollows, and sloping watersheds from the dense pages of repurposed books. One of his favorite mediums are bound stacks of old dictionaries and encyclopedias which he carves using a method of sandblasting to which he later applies oil paints, inks, pigments and dry pastels, crayon, adhesives, and beeswax. When photographed up close the works appear almost realistic, as if the viewer is looking at aerial or satellite topographies of Earth.

John Latham

John Latham: Conceptual Art, Books and Glass

Born in February of 1921, John Latham was a Zambia-born British conceptual artist, educated at Winchester College. After the Second World War, he studied art, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Latham married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in Westminster in 1951.

The spray can became Latham’s primary medium for his work. In addition to spray paint, Latham tore, sawed, chewed and burnt books to create collage material for his work, such as the 1960 “Film Star” series. In 1966, he took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London led by artist and political activist Gustav Metzger along with Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell and Al Hansen.

Latham’s “skoob” (books written backwards) works, using books or materials derived from them, had the power to shock. He moved from collages to towers of books which he then burnt, awakening uncomfortable echoes of the Nazi regime’s public burning of banned books.

From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time House in Peckham. In 1991 he produced “God is Great (no. 2)”, a conceptual artwork featuring copies of the Bible, Quran, and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in two and attached to a sheet of glass. In 2005 Tate Britain held an exhibition of Latham’s work.Latham died a year later at Kings College Hospital, Camberwell, on January 1st 2006.