Movable Medley
Movable Medley
Art Students League of Denver
200 Grant Street, Denver, CO 80203
September 30-November 7, 2021
Co-juried by Elliot McNally and Teresa Burk; Curated by Abecedarian Artists’ Books
Admission: Free
This exhibition is held in conjunction with the Movable Book Society’s Denver conference.
Review by Maggie Sava
It’s easy to think of a book’s form strictly in terms of how long it will take you to read it (especially for thick books). Often the physical nature of a book seems inconsequential—a simple necessity to convey the text. But Movable Medley, the current exhibition at Art Students League of Denver (ASLD), challenges our understanding of books as merely functional vehicles for text. Made up of 29 artworks by 26 artists, the exhibit encourages visitors to deliberate over how the artists unravel and reimagine the mechanics of storytelling, the concept of books as objects, and the interwoven nature of literary and visual art.
A view of the exhibition Movable Medley at the Art Students League of Denver. Image by DARIA.
Located in the historic Sherman School, ASLD provides a more than fitting venue for a bibliophilic exhibition. [1] Signs directing visitors to classrooms, creaky wooden floors, and the converging central staircases all amplify ASLD’s old schoolhouse atmosphere. The show itself is located throughout the ground floor and upstairs lobby, with each book displayed on a pedestal. Every book has a label indicating whether people can touch it or not and friendly staff members are available to help with any works requiring assistance. [2]
Thomas Parker Williams, Voyage No. 1, 2017, Tyvek, watercolor, ink, wood, and brass, 8.5 x 11 x 3.75 inches. Image by DARIA.
Displayed just to the left of the main doors, Thomas Parker Williams’s Voyage No. 1 (2017) immediately signals jurors Elliot McNally and Teresa Burk’s intention to shape a show of “books that go beyond the opening and closing of covers and the turning of pages.” [3] In fact, Williams’s work does not even have covers to open or pages to turn. Rather, it is a blue wooden box adorned with gold details and a porthole-like window revealing a hand-painted ocean scene. Turning the brass knob on the front makes the dramatic watercolor and ink seascape—which is painted on a scroll—progress. It unwinds from one end and collects around the opposite spool.
Voyage No. 1 creates an analog animation evoking Victorian-era experimentations with flip books and motion picture films. [4] As such, Williams blurs the line of what defines bookmaking while still carrying the viewer through a Romantic plot whose main and only character is the immense and turbulently expressive ocean cycling from placid to violent waters and back again.
Jan Dove, The Book of BonBons, 2015, book board, cotton, mylar, and paper, 13.25 x 11 x 13.25 inches. Image by Maggie Sava.
Williams is not the only artist in the show to reinterpret the composition of a book. Jan Dove's The Book of BonBons (2015) also flouts our expectation for bound pages (with the exception of one miniature book included within the larger work). It mimics a chocolate box with treats in paper liners and a diagram on the top identifying each one. However, rather than sweets it is filled with small puzzle games that, when carefully handled and manipulated, reveal surprises in the form of hidden images, secret messages, and jingling bells. Within one there is a quote from David Hockney that astutely describes the exhibition: “People tend to forget that play is serious.”
A detail view of Jan Dove’s The Book of BonBons, 2015, book board, cotton, mylar, and paper, 13.25 x 11 x 13.25 inches. Image by DARIA.
Doves’s work foregrounds play as one of the exhibition’s central themes, defining not only how the artists push the nature of books as objects but also serving as a reward for visitors. Even those works which do not allow for touch or physical interaction inspire us to engage in a choreography of head tilting, crouching, leaning over on our tippy toes, and circling the pedestals to get a better view of the contents and to try to read the text. In the end, part of the experience of the show is coming to terms with the fact that not all the books can be read in their entirety, either because parts of the contents are inaccessible or because the (de)construction of the books intentionally obscures legibility.
Mary Jeanne Linford, Cocoon, 2019, paper, colored pencil, ink, mylar, thread, and cloth, 7 x 8 x 1.5 inches. Image by Maggie Sava.
Despite these experimentations with form, Moveable Medley at its core is not about denying tradition. There are even several works that take on more “conventional” book structures, like Mary Jeanne Linford’s Cocoon (2019) which reads cover to cover with a poem unfolding within. The deeper themes of the exhibition come across in the ways the artists weave historical awareness and references into their works, calling attention to our fluid and ever-adapting relationships to books and stories.
Emily J. Martin, Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out, 2020, paper, ink, thread, book board, and book cloth, 13 x 9 inches. Image by Maggie Sava.
For example, Emily J. Martin’s Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out (2020) toys with a text’s evolving performativity—the ability of words and text to enact their contents rather than symbolize or represent them—through the lens of one of Wilde’s most famous plays, The Importance of Being Earnest. [5] When turned, the five volvelles—rotating wheel charts—make quotes from the play flow through the mouths of drawings of Wilde and his characters. [6] This activation of the book questions how written dialogue might be “spoken” without leaving the page and how Wilde’s legacy, the tragic story of his own life, and his distinctive voice maintain their potency through this method of broadening the forms of their textual and theatrical dissemination.
Heather Doyle-Maier, Riptides, 2019, fabric, thread, vellum, and paper, 7.25 x 3.125 x 1.25 inches. Image by DARIA.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing examples of the interplay of history (both cultural and personal), craft, and text in the show is Heather Doyle-Maier’s book Riptides (2019). Doyle-Maier uses vellum in this work, which was a common material for books before the widespread use of paper, particularly in medieval illuminated manuscripts. [7] While utilizing this age-old material, Doyle-Maier also draws on the tradition of quilting to tell a matrilineal tale of the difficulty of coming to terms with the domestic and interpersonal roles expected of women. Quilts are not only important pieces of domestic histories, but they also contain cultural and familial languages passed down through generations. Doyle-Maier’s use of her family’s “Ocean Waves” quilt pattern accentuates the symbolic text she layers among the alphabetic text, creating a nuanced portrait of womanhood, motherhood, and sisterhood. [8]
A detail view of Heather Doyle-Maier’s Riptides, 2019, fabric, thread, vellum, and paper, 7.25 x 3.125 x 1.25 inches. Image by DARIA.
As Riptides demonstrates—in conversation with the other 28 works in the show—the material form of a book can expand and unfold the intricate physical and intertextual layers of its contents. McNally, Burk, and Abecedarian Artists’ Books have created a show that helps visitors rediscover the sensory, aesthetic, and sculptural potential of book arts. While Moveable Medley encourages different types of play and rouses our curiosity, it also highlights the innate quietness and meticulousness of both the creation and reception of the artworks. The exhibit expands the meaning of readability within art (and literary) spaces to create a unique experience for each visitor.
Maggie Sava is a writer based in Denver, Colorado. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History and English, Creative Writing from the University of Denver and a master’s degree in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Writing is her main artistic engagement, which she pursues through research, art writing, and poetry.
[1] Continuing the legacy of the building, ASLD is an educational facility providing arts-based courses, workshops, and summer camps.
[2] In accordance with ASLD’s messaging around inclusive community engagement, they provide a social story for the exhibition on their website that explains different accessibility measures and suggestions for navigating the space and the artworks. The catalog and statements are available online with pictures of each artwork and, in some cases, videos of them as well.
[3] Elliot McNally and Teresa Burk, “Jurors’ Statement.”
[4] A significant difference between Williams’s Voyage No. 1 and motion pictures like Eadweard Muybridge’s serialized action shots from the late 19th century (for example, Horse in Motion from 1878) is that Williams has created one long continuous painting on a scroll that has the illusion of isolated frames due to the porthole window, while Muybridge’s sequences are made up of actual individual stills. Williams’s work is not unlike a modern version of 19th century panorama paintings—huge works on scrolls that were often narrated as they were shown to audiences to convey a dramatic tale. Panoramas served as predecessors to the diorama, which was created by Jacques Louis Daguerre in 1822 after he had studied with a panorama artist. Dioramas, shown in special theaters, switched between multiple views of the same scene and used plays of light to convey movement and time within otherwise still images to suggest a living scene. See Allison C. Meier, “Did North America’s Longest Painting Inspire Moby-Dick?,” JSTOR Daily, June 20, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/did-north-americas-longest-painting-inspire-moby-dick/.; Addison Nugent, “Diorama, qu’est-ce que c’est?,” JSTOR Daily, July 1, 2020, https://daily.jstor.org/diorama-quest-ce-que-cest/.
[5] For more information on the concept of performativity, see “Performativity,” Tate, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performativity. See also Della Pollock, "Performativity," in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States: Oxford University Press, 1995, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195066081.001.0001/acref-9780195066081-e-0611.
[6] Volvelles are made up of overlaid, rotating discs used to create charts. The Arabic calculation devices were first brought to Europe in the medieval era. Kristine Chapman, “Volvelles: early paper calculators,” Amgueddfa Blog, July 19, 2019, https://museum.wales/blog/2044/Volvelles-early-paper-calculators/.
[7] “Treasures in Full: Gutenberg Bible: 5. The vellum,” British Library, accessed October 7, 2021, https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/vellum.html.; “The Making of a Medieval Book,” The J. Paul Getty Museum, accessed October 7, 2021, http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/making/.
[8] From Heather Doyle-Maier’s artist statement: https://abecedariangallery.com/store/product/heather-doyle-maier-riptides/.
