Horizontal Grandeur 2014

The Stevens County History Museum's 7th annual Horizontal Grandeur exhibit opens in Morris, MN on July 10th and runs through October 31, 2014.  Each year the Museum invites artists who live in prairie-containing states and provinces across the US and Canada to submit pieces related in some way to the "Horizontal Grandeur" of the prairie.  This year, two of my collages have been included (thanks Stevens County!)...

I Imagine a Prairie

Millinery Wheat Farmers

No, Never Seen the Ocean

Open Water Will Wander to Decatur

Decatur Arts Alliance (near Atlanta, Georgia) in partnership with the Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur, is putting on its second juried exhibition of book arts known as "The Book as Art."  I'm pleased that one of my recent altered books, Open Water, will be part of that exhibit, which opens on July 18th and runs until September 19, 2014.

Open Water is a one-of-a-kind altered book.  The original book is a vintage navigation chart book for the Kanawha River of West Virginia, published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in April of 1949.  The images in the book are a series of simple, cut & paste collages I did earlier this year, each using one or two images imposed on an open ocean water view.  The cover is spray-painted and the text of the book, printed in pale gray on translucent paper, was written by me for this project.  Some views of the book and the poem follow:

 

In the beginning was the blue dream of an impossible sea.

Shards of watery light penetrated the dryness of my soul.

The sea has no set form; it rushes in to obliterate whatever landscape dares to meet it.

It cannot be measured. So it is with love.

The sea offers pearls and glittering scales and sharp slants of cool light, but

riptides guard her borders.

In her depths are dead men tangled in the fibrous bones of shipwrecks and great monsters.

So it is with love.

When I first whispered your name, the waves answered.

It was a language I had never learned:

sinuous,

treacherous,

brutal.

Not wind, but sighs.

Not ocean, but waiting.

Not you, not you.

But later, when finally I fell to my knees and surrendered to the waves,

I heard a softer whisper.

I do not remember who I was before I met you.

And I will never know who you were before you met me.

We have been washed clean by these relentless waves,

this overwhelming tide,

this everlasting sea.

We are sailing our own sea, you and me.

Monsters lie below, but fathoms of blueness separate us, protect us.

And as we sail on, I am certain of nothing except the soft memory of blueness,

and you.

--Lynn Skordal, "Open Water" (2014)

Iconography

(Paper, watercolor pencil, red thread.)

Inhaling, Exhaling

Lost Confessions

Black and White

 Sister Wives

Paris Noir

Neil Patrick Harris, Breaching

More Birds

Some of My Best Friends are Birds

Nude Nouveau

Some In-Sight Into Animals

 Animal Anatomy

As Scarce As Hen's Teeth

(done for the Kollage Kit weekly theme:  "similes")

Baby Soul

I think I've gotten the ATCs out of my system...

All of these are little artist trading card size (2.5" x 3.5") and I'm seriously going to try and NOT make any more of these for awhile.

  

Into the Woods with Their Little Dog

A Few More from the Stoddard Series

Ebony and Ivory

A Mexican Harem

Magic

Seedpods

Wanderlust

PSBA 4th Annual Members Exhibition

Opening this week at the Collins Memorial Library at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, is the annual exhibition of artist's books and book arts created by the members of Puget Sound Book Artists.  The exhibit runs from June 5 - July 31, 2014, and there are some wonderful pieces on view, well worth a visit.  Here are the two books I have on display:

“Early Lessons” is a re-imagined child’s early reader which tells the story of Tom, Sally, their pets and family on a strange trip through Europe.  The pictures and story were created using images and text cut from several early readers, and collaged onto reproductions of photochrom travel postcards from the late 1900’s. The text uses only words and phrases from the early readers, so that a first grader could (but probably shouldn’t!) read the dubious adventures.

“Bright Threads” is a book rescue project -- the original 1897 book of essays for women, had loose, torn covers and disintegrating pages.  Part of the original cover has been inset into the cover of a repurposed dictionary; title pages and several text pages have been preserved as an accordion-style, collaged booklet; passages from pages too fragile to handle have been copied onto fabric and sewn into “text-ribbons” decorated with lace, beading and charms, nestled into a hand-carved niche, ready to be handled and read.  

Lunch

Paper collage on vintage family (not mine) photo, 11" x 14" including original matting.

More Teeny Tiny Little ATCs (2.5" x 3.5")