Re-Reading and Other Bookish Desires
January 21, 2020 @ 8:00 am - February 20, 2020 @ 5:00 pm
Re-Reading and Other Bookish Desires
Suzanne Dittenber
Dittenber’s works engage in the dialectics of space—books shaped by their histories and contexts. Indications of domestic furniture and interiors allow for intimacy to take shape, culling memories in relationship to reading. Paintings and sculptures of books carrying blemishes and imperfections demonstrate a history of receptivity to nuance and a sensitivity to touch and environment. Like an attentive listener, these works are both responsive and wistful. And yet, through a separation from specific sources, the information that would normally connect us to universal ideas is absent. Her books become a blank slate onto which we can project our desires. Waterlines and dog-ears, evidence of a personal rapport with materiality, add trace amounts of mystery to cherished stories placed in literal and metaphorical cradles of collective knowledge found in our institutions and on our bed stands.
Exhibition Run: January 21 – February 20
Image: Pink Spine, Oil on canvas, 2018, 36″ x 24″