Project Statement
In Eleven Rooms, I examine the relationship between language, form, context, and displacement. I appropriate excerpts from three literary works and use these excerpts to create a text-based version of sculptures from the 2015 Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at MCA Chicago. The three texts I draw from are Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The migration and integration of the three disparate texts inhabit a form located partly in real space—on a page—and partly in psychological space. The repositioned “sculpted” texts are susceptible to new interpretations, and become something other than they were in their previous environment.
I determined the text for each page by chance, using a predetermined set of rules to preclude personal preference, in order to open the artwork to unexpected outcomes. Chance bypasses rational control and bias in the selection and placement of text and sets in motion a process that has unpredictable results.
The resulting relationship between the texts and the sculptural forms reveals unexpected identities and correspondences each one triggered and determined by their surroundings. For example, Virginia Woolf’s lines in room 11, “he must pluck the petals from a rose” is woven into the pattern of Salcedo’s installation in the same room, a shroud composed entirely of rose petals. There is a sense of resonance as the language forfeits its original descriptive function and in its fragmented state transforms into something new.
The book emulates the format of the exhibition catalogue—which is itself a historical testimony that gives a particular permanence to a temporary event.
Exhibition: Spring 2016, Making Out, Dfbrl8r Gallery, Chicago
2017 “Telling in Full” exhibition part of the Lancaster Words Festival, 6-8 July 2017 Lancaster, England
Title note: The Doris Salcedo retrospective at MCA Chicago was exhibited in eleven adjoining rooms. “Rooms” is a recurring theme in the three appropriated texts by Anne Carson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf.
Collections: The Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum of Art New York, The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Stanford University, Green Library, Special Collections, UC Berkeley, Special Collections, UCLA, William Andrews Clark Library, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, and private collections.
Size: 81/4” x 5 3/4”, 38 pages. Materials include silk thread, human hair, and beeswax. First edition limited to 25 numbered and signed copies. Printed at Cushing Printers Chicago, digital offset on white matte paper and hand-bound by the artist.
Design, binding, and cover by Emel Thomson.
Available from: www.vampandtramp.com