Présences du littéraire dans l’espace public canadien - Artstage

The Book

Marie-Claude Langevin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:44:14 +0000

Artwork identification

Artwork creator(s):

Sandler, Ilan

Artwork creator(s):

Sandler, Ilan

Text author(s):

Sandler, Ilan

Text author(s):

Sandler, Ilan

Installation year:

2006

Remarks on location:

Public art exhibition overlooking the North side of Highway 401 between Renforth Drive and Dixie Road.

Artwork description

Source: Ilan Sandler (2008). Works. (http://www.ilansandler.com/#self)

Description:

The Book is a steel sculpture representing a book with two pages torn away from its spine. The spine is perpendicular to the ground, the covers are open, and the pages appear to blow in the wind. From the highway, viewers see a book that looks as if it were lifted by the wind and oriented towards a sheet that has already escaped its binding.

Mention(s) légale(s) des illustrations:

Photo credits:

Text of the artwork:

[incomplete text]

«(COURT) H KHET HASIR --- «(WHEEL) TETH --- «(THROWING […] C 1 G […] GAN […] --- «MU (WATER) M LEXEME MEME LEXICON --- «BAYT TETH HOU […] --- «PHONE PHONEME MORPHEME --- «RA […] --- «(HEAD)»

Artwork theme:

Evolution of writing, language (from the latin origins, language, symbols, codes, alphabets)

History

History:

Art Exhibition to Artstage, Toronto, ON, September 28, 2006

Because the scale of the book is enlarged, the sculpture becomes anthropomorphized and appears to be performing a choreographed dance with the escaping page. The rigid steel plates look animated because of the pages' articulation as rolling forms suggesting a drama between pages and books, readers and words, languages and alphabets, as well as writers and ideas. From the vantage point of the highway, one can see the sculpture as a representation of a literary struggle: despite the attempt to bind ideas together, a page of thoughts escapes. "Although most books tend to be read from front to back, The Book's gesture can be absorbed by viewers in an instant as they drive by the installation. However, viewers who have an opportunity to get closer to the site will recognize that the holes in the steel pages form clusters of words. The clustered texts link the letters of the Latin alphabet to its predecessors, which include the Phoenician alphabet that emerged from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician letters that developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to represent syllabic sounds of Semitic languages dating to approximately 2000 B.C. Carvings of a twenty-two character Phoenician alphabet from 1000 B.C. have been linked to earlier carvings from approximately 1750 B.C. (known as the Wadi el-Hol script) that have been inspired by particular Egyptian hieroglyphs. «Each cluster of letters on the page ripping out of the book are symbols that were developed from architectural and technological innovations. The letters on the freed page were derived from parts of the human body. As light passes through the outlines of the characters in the book their projections continue to change and the letters and symbols shift into forms that are less familiar. The future imprints of text on a page are dependent on their ancestral roots as well as the symbolic languages, codes, and alphabets that are evolving out of our contemporary society. The steel book is a monument poised between eras in the evolution of thought. «Ilan Sandler 2006 «Notes on the Origins of the Latin alphabet «It is surmised that members of a Semitic tribe, possibly working as mercenaries or scribes within the Egyptian army, developed a notation for purely utilitarian purposes: in order for the mercenaries to communicate amongst themselves and keep track of the names and other information pertaining to captured troops, they developed a kind of shorthand notation that was syllabic in structure. Since the hieroglyphic system contained over three thousand characters and was therefore difficult for outsiders to learn, the idea of simplifying the writing system into a syllabic system allowed language to be more simply expressed phonetically. An example of the evolution of a letter can be seen in the Latin letter B. In order to make it easy for someone to remember that a certain symbol represented a ìBî sound, a shape was used that originated from a hieroglyph that began with ìBî. In ancient Hebrew for example the word BAYT means house, and thus from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a floor plan of a reed shelter a symbol was derived that over a thousand years came to look like a Phoenician character of a triangular domicile with a pillar attached to it. The modern day form of the letter B evolved through a number of civilizations that included Greek and Etruscan writing systems."

Source: Ian Sandler (2008). Projects. The Book.

http://www.ilansandler.com/projects.html#self

Dimensions

Other information

Artist's biography:

Ilan Sandler

Source:

1. Ian Sandler, artiste ilan@sandlerstudio.com 2. Artstage PO Box 356 Station 'A' Toronto Ontario M5W 1C2 TEL (416) 690-3622

Document(s):

Projects. The Book

Ian Sandler

Still Life

Marie-Claude Langevin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:32:27 +0000

Artwork identification

Artwork creator(s):

Skelton, Carl

Artwork creator(s):

Skelton, Carl

Text author(s):

Skelton, Carl

Text author(s):

Skelton, Carl

Installation year:

2006

Remarks on location:

Public art exhibition overlooking the North side of Highway 401 between Renforth Drive and Dixie Road.

Artwork description

Source: Artstage (2008). Artstage. (http://www.artstage.ca/index.htm)

Mention(s) légale(s) des illustrations:

Photo credits:

Text of the artwork:

STILL --- LIFE

Artwork theme:

Still life, change, instability, daily life

History

History:

Art Exhibition to Artstage, Toronto, ON, 28 September 2006

STILL LIFE is intended to respond to its circumstances: long sightlines, a drive-by experience that is by and large going to be experienced many times by people who travel that road on a daily basis, albeit at very different speeds according to traffic conditions, and in very different states of mind, not to mention from a wide variety of cultural perspectives.

In the first instance, STILL LIFE is a gentle pun on the situation: a work of art where a billboard would normally be. Any number of artists have pastiched or deconstructed Billboard advertising… this is simpler, a play on the ironies of the phrase’s constituent parts, “still” and “life”.

STILL Under these viewing conditions, anything ARTSTAGE includes will be un-still: the works of art may not be “kinetic” in their construction, but they certainly must be in their public’s experience. If you only see the work from the highway, it’s effectively kinetic unless you stop the car. On the other hand, the work is hyper-still too: it is a regular reminder that no matter what else has happened since the last time you drove by, this pocket of reality is “still” what it was, unchanged at least provisionally. That characteristic, of anticipating and yet stepping out of the flux of change surrounding us, is fundamental to art’s role in both public and private spheres.

LIFE “Still life” is a simple tag line, but it has a lot of layers to play with. At one level, the aggregate of all the installations that add up to ARTSTAGE itself will be a large-scale still-life arrangement. At another, the phrase will evoke an incredible variety of specific experiences of works of art in the minds of drivers and passengers on the 401. One can almost see a cloud of memories of still life paintings forming in the minds of people as they pass, and then dispersing through all the different trains of thought down the road. As the genre most typically associated with details of daily life, and most broadly experienced as historical “ART” in mainstream culture, “still life” will be just about the exact contrary of most of the genre and associations it names… the other end of the spectrum of what a work of art can be in relation to time, space, and place.

STILL LIFE What proportion of the millions who will drive by, how many times, will the reading actually not even register as an “Art Thing”? Out of context, the simple reminder that whatever you think is all change, speed, instability… something inthe way of the world is actually not changing. In some small measure, the piece responds to Heraclitus - where his saying that “you never steptwice into the same river” describes the instability of the phenomenal world as an absolute, STILL LIFE implies something quite different. The viewing of it will unfold differently every time, for every person, from the first sight of “STILL” in the distance, to the breaking-up and re-resolving of the letters and words across the lenticular surface, to the much shorter span of time “LIFE” can be read at the other end of the viewing sequence. In some of the minds, all of the time, the question will seem to come from nowhere: what HASN’T changed since the last time you passed this way?

Source : Artstage (2008). Cark Skelton.

http://www.artstage.ca/skelton.php

Dimensions

Other information

Artist's biography:

Cark Skelton

Source:

1. Carl Skelton 362 West 30th Street #1, New York, NY 10001 USA (917)601-7122 c a rl@ultratopia.com (personnel) Carl Skelton, directeur Intigrated Digital Media Institute at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn. +1-718-260-4018 cskelton@poly.edu (lieu de travail) 2. Artstage PO Box 356 Station 'A' Toronto Ontario M5W 1C2 TEL (416) 690-3622

Document(s):

Cark Skelton