Monday, August 6, 2012

How to Write a Novel @ Field Projects


A very well-curated body of work about books and storytelling that feels like you’ve just walked into a very stylish study. Karl LaRocca shows meticulously drawn copies of receipts with an obsessive care that seems to scream that the objects hold a personal significance. Aaron Krach has books staked to human height, volumes that have been checked out of the New York Public Library and had their cover pages stamped to alert the reader that the book’s author committed suicide. The books reportedly are going back to the library with, I would assume, considerable late fees. That will hopefully reenter circulation with nice little pieces of jarring vandalism that might permanently recontextualize a reader’s experience of the book, very much like finding a penis drawn onto and into figures in art books from the library. The center of the room features Martin McMurry’s wood sculpture books with hand-painted dust jackets where the back covers portraits portray the authors as being anyone from Anwar Sadat to Steve Zissou.

The show’s opposite wall seems to get a little more open and trippy with the theme, where Tom Marquet’s text drawings of the phrase “it is what it is” and “is it what is it” not only takes on lazy and truly dim phrasing, turning it into op art for those of us with dyslexia. I find my brain has a hard time not reading them all as “it is what it is” and only when I pick up the actual text “is it what is it” without punctuation the phrase becomes a somewhat coherent mess of meaning and intent. The pieces are well paired with Siobhan McBride’s small, dark, disjointed landscapes where a teepee appears to be exploding in lava while hovering in the subconscious of a wooden road. A very nice compact show that is downright humble in its straightforwardness and elegant in its execution.


Through Aug 11th

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