| By the Book: Artistic Alchemy |
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by Steve Mayo - - 8 Nov., 2004
By the Book: Artistic Alchemy by Steve Mayo MIAMI – This month a book fair at the downtown campus of Miami Dade College and an art exhibition in Wynwood give book lovers and art enthusiasts an opportunity to see their favorite media in a different context. Ink on paper goes a long way in these two venues. Making book for many of these writers and artists is where it’s at in both reading and writing. While the Miami Book Fair will be filled with works from world-famous authors, Tony Wynn, a Miami artist presenting the first of five books, gives the art collector a good reason to get downtown this month. Wynn’s Believery is part art catalogue and part poetry and prose collection, he calls “artwritings,” which dares both reader and viewer to suspend evangelical assumptions about God, the Bible, parables, miracles and prophets; and understand that the Kennedys might have had guardian angels hired through affirmative action and that the angel Vaschon might appear today to let you know God would like to speak with you at day’s end. You might even find something new about eve in Wynn’s Believery. “I think of the writing as if it were the Bible being written today,” Wynn says about Believery, a project that comes on the heels of an emerging artist project he launched two years ago at Serious Studios in Miami’s Design District.  Tony Wynn - Believery Tony Wynn - Believery The writing doesn’t necessarily follow the paintings, in fact, For Wynn, in the beginning there was the word, pictures came after. For most of his life he’s been writing, and over the years he’s developed a concise, yet vivid touch with text and image. He describes his art as “intuitive.” But it’s only been over the past five or six years he started painting in his own raw, instinctive style that’s at times unsettling, frank, and sometimes clever, but never far from the way he sees the truth. “I see it clearly,” Wynn says wryly. Eureka: What happens to art at a book fair and to the book at an art exhibition? A stone’s throw north in the Wynwood Art District, book lovers will find an intriguing exhibition of book as art object. Art Vitam Gallery hosts an exhibition entitled “The Art of Books and Writing” where American artist Matthew Rose shows his unbound books, The Sea in October, among other works. The show runs through Nov. 20. Rose, a writer and artist who lives in Paris, has created an unbound installation of collages that represent the pages of a modern-thriller-romance novel telling a beautiful, painful and sometimes weird and black coming-of-age story about innocence awakening to consciousness and heartbreak. “In my artwork, I direct accidents--paint spills, found objects, mistakes -- and organize them, oftentimes into books,” he says. That's how BOYS LIFE, GOD, and The Sea in October are put together. They reflect a rhyming of consciousness in text and image -- all with a biting edge. Rose’s work is punctuated with a very black sense of humor about the world, but not so black you can’t find yourself in it. “I often pull the rug out from under the reader,” Rose explains. “There’s a long history of artists making their own books--just look at the Fluxus artists. It’s the most efficient way to organize words and pictures. Plus, I love saying, “Book him, Danno.” In the same exhibition, Mary Bennett presents a reshaping of the book into A RANGE OF sculptural objects, like her Surfing the Himalayas and The Middle Ages 2004. “Mary’s bookworks make sensual a common object,” says gallery owner Sophie-Anne Blachet. “And at the same time permit the artist to rewrite the historical content of her personal material.” "I started making art after 20 years in the corporate world,” says Bennet. “That world of linear thinking projects with desired outcomes clearly stated from the onset. Now, I try to conceive an idea and let it evolve. I’m most interested in using media that has a prior history that I can rework, re-imagine, re-contextualize or re-invent a story.” Claire Jeanine Satin and Michael Baigneaux round out the Art Vitam Show with unusual approaches to writing and reading. Satin combines influences from John Cage, Jasper Johns and her father -- a professor of stenography and type-writing. Her transparent and fragile books (literally, clear pages) allow light to capture changing appearances of words and images. Hands and strings are sewn onto the pages and light filters dreamily through them. Baigneaux’s work focuses more on the hand-written word and its evolution. He’s devised something he calls “ambigrammes,” which, he said, “analyze the efficiency of letters and grammar.” Baigneaux boils the Roman alphabet down to the 13 letters needed to produce a sentence. Thehe morphs his new texts into a story. The results are graphic codes, tantalizingly familiar and pleasantly strange. “Words and books have long gone hand in hand with modern art,” Blachet says. “I think artists who work on books and calligraphy try to explain how words are the primary necessity of culture.” What: 2004 Miami Book Fair International What: The Art of Books and Writing
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