Books installation

This architectural installation of a wave-like modular book structure and a cylindrical space shows the intensive spatial atmosphere exerted by books. The open installation condenses the intimate feeling of old libraries from which anybody finds it hard to escape. Large used books of outdated titles and too old to be read, are assembled with a special designed metal connector. An endless modular meta-grid applies its function to walls, room dividers or shelves.

Ideally the developing structure is a personalised object. Old books find a new use which have been collected through a lifetime - the ‘books’ structure will be like no other, a distinctive modular wall is created!


studio aisslinger

Mortar

Books, bar clamps. Installation at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library
Einat Imber

Wilco (Berkeley)

Commemorative poster for Wilco’s performance at The Greek Theatre in Berkeley, CA (18 x 24, 2-color screen-print).
Mikey Burton

Bookshelf

Isaac Layman's unnervingly banal color photographs of household items are astonishingly subtle in their perception-based tomfoolery. The Seattle artist's earliest work on view presents an almost-seamless image of a bookcase whose spines are turned away from the camera, so that the books become little more than nameless swathes of bound paper. The viewer's impulse to scan the shelves for familiar titles is doubly thwarted when they notice that the photograph almost seems to shift its perspective, depending on where the viewer looks. Almost imperceptibly, Layman has combined photographs taken from different vantage points in creating Bookcase, resulting in a deceptive network of impossible sightlines.
Isaac Layman

Bookshelves by Hans-Peter Feldmann

"Bookshelves" is a 5-panel, life-size photograph of Feldmann's own bookshelves at his home in Düsseldorf. As an artist renowned for using found and discarded objects of others, "Bookshelves" is a rare look at the personal world of a voyeur through the looking glass. The dialectical tension between the banality of the shelf itself and its physical size becomes paramount, as there is a counterintuitive ruse in showing an everyday object shown at a grandiose scale. This idea, however, is unexpectedly met with the fact that the everyday object exists in actuality at the same size. Feldmann mocks photography's promise of a replica of reality, as the obvious impossibility of browsing a fake library (even at life size) becomes an endearingly cruel gag.
303 Gallery

Ideal bookshelf

For a while, I've been documenting people's bookshelves as a form of portraiture; you can actually learn a lot about folks by their books' covers. Now, I'm working on a series of "ideal" bookshelves: sets of favorites—mine or someone else's—amalgamated in a picture, even if they don't usually live on shelves anywhere near each other.

Deliberately grouping the books—instead of painting them as they are serendipitously found—makes me focus much more on the physical books themselves, and in particular, the design of the spines. It's such a small place for a lot of information, with very little room for distinct characteristics, even though it's exactly what you use to identify books. As someone who does a lot of design work, I love the process of turning graphic design into art. And I love that a book is something created very personally and then mass-produced in order to affect many other people very personally. I group and paint them to turn them back into something very personal and intimate.

This set happens to be a grouping of my favorite children's books; I’ve been more influenced by books I read as a kid than books from any other time in my life.
Jane Mount

The Human Bookshelf

David Blazquez

Bookshelf portraits

Victoria Reichelt paints portraits of bookshelves. Pictured above is The Coorey Family, oil on canvas, 2009, 148 x 37cm.

"While some of these bookshelf paintings are of random books, I’ve recently done a series that are portraits of people. So I’d go to their houses and photograph their bookshelves and then make paintings from the photos as a way of telling the viewer about the person."

Interesting article on Reichelt at Art Monthly and interview at Inside Out blog with details of her exhibition Bibliomania: The Bookshelf Portrait Project at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts

Victoria Reichelt