Art of the written word

Changeroom for bookworms

I don’t know about you, but I have stumbled upon so much book art lately. And I’m not just talking about arty looking books (although the newly re-designed Random House Vintage classics are looking awfully fetching these days), but art made with books, like this cool silo built  from a stack of paperbacks that functions as the changeroom in the supremely chic LynnSteven boutique in Vancouver’s Gastown.        

Designed by a Vancouver-based firm called McFarlane, Green, Biggar (known locally as the vaguely druggy sounding mgb), the silo book stack is supported by an interior frame of rolled steel, and you can see both the frame and the titles of each paperback when you enter this most bookish changeroom to try something on for size.        

Changeroom reading

 Here’s a close-up view from the back where you can perhaps more clearly take in the conceptual punch of using print books–now arguably an outdated art form–as pure building material:    

Readers rear-view

I must say mgb which did a lovely job with the shop on the whole, also cleverly left the pretty old tiled floor of the former occupants of the site inside the entry as a reminder of the former occupants–a literary reference in tile, if you will.        

Fashionable floor

  But back to books.      

A couple of years ago I fell hard for the work of a Hamilton-born, NY-based artist named Doug Beube (check out his work at jhbgallery.com) who started doing a lot of work with books, mostly because they were cheap (libraries and yard sales of course give the damn things away these days), and then because he realised there was something very poignant in their slow demise in the culture at large. Hence books, re-imagined by Doug as moulding material.   

Doug deconstructs and sculpts books, often in playful configurations. Here is a piece of his, using an outdated atlas, called Faultlines.        

Atlas, Shredded

And then, a couple of years ago at Toronto’s all-night contemporary art happening, Nuit Blanche, the big hit for me and my partners in crime was an enormous fort of paperbacks stacked much like the mgb changeroom but without the interior support–(it was a mess at the end of the night) in the austere loggia of an Ontario Ministry office.        

Now I’ve just discovered that the concept has gone commercial and you can buy your own book sculpture for home use: a hollowed-out old book that you can use as a protective, and stylish–shell for your ereader or iPad, on etsy through a seller called Vintage covers.        

Forgive its ugly autumnal background , but the old Peacock hardcover below has been quite charming repurposed and upcycled by BC-based Vintage covers, for use as an iPad skin–a literary cover, in effect, for those deserters of the fading world of print in favour of a digital keypad.        

Hardcover cover-up