Page Turners

Art books and wall-mounted artworks of various genres and media grace the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative Members’ Exhibit at the Book Arts Center.

Several of the books have a semi-comic (or comics) flavor, including several multimedia diaries and a sweet teen fantasy graphic novel.

The attractively drawn graphic novel is by Tim Ferrara. Multimedia diaries are by Heather Gravert and Jan Nagle. Gravert’s is a diary basically as scrapbook, including slogan buttons, newspaper essays and articles, magazine clippings, particularly fashion illustrations, often hand-embellished with flowers and other simple doodles, and occasional more traditional hand-written diary entries often on the theme—based on cursory inspection—of “Why aren’t I being more diligent keeping”—that is, writing in—“my diary.”

A handmade book by Annie Stoll.

From Tim Ferrara's graphic novel, "Honey and the Whirlwind"

Nagle’s diary is comic mainly as ironic. Consisting largely of print-outs of pages of internet arcana and self-help features such as quizzes to determine aptitudes and personality type, and Facebook conversations with friends about the revelations particularly of the aptitude and personality quizzes. Much doodled over in spirals and geometrical patterns in a way that often makes the raw data and comment hard to decipher, not to mention to interpret. A recurrent theme and anxiety—again based on cursory inspection—seems to be the matter of narcissism. Imagine, in a project kicking off from Facebook. Definitions and descriptions of this potentially fatal psychological condition—from Wikipedia, of course—appear several times in the course of the diary, including on the final page, as if as the last word.

Meanwhile, Agnes Love has a fold-out “Book of Grievances” in idiosyncratically illegible calligraphy (likely listing the author’s grievances, but hard to know for sure) overpainted with Hieronymus Bosch-reminiscent beaked and bony critters of uncertain species and one refreshingly benign-looking giraffe.

In a more serious—that is, non-comic—vein, Jozef Bajus, whose artwork on books is often executed with a scissors and/or X-Acto knife, has a black and white print (or better, shades of gray) of ocean surf, with handwriting above and below, that was used as an illustration in a book presenting a single poem in the Slovak language that was then translated into 26 other languages by that many translators, with illustrations by a dozen or so visual artists. The book is also on display. The poem is by Juraj Kuniak, and is about the poet’s fascination with the line of the horizon—where in this case sky and sea meet—a matter at least as crucially interesting to visual artists as in general to poets.

What is notable about the artwork is that the print—the ocean surf, with writing top and bottom—is multiply copied and layered in about six layers, into the top layers of which long, narrow lenticular openings are sliced, so that lower-layer copies are visible in the openings, maintaining the continuity of the original image, but in a most unusual way adding a real, not just visual, depth dimension.

Among the wall-mounted works, Amy Hartman has a series of little box frames housing imagery and objects on the theme of the pyramid as Egyptian monument but also more abstractly as pure geometrical construct. The series recollects Joseph Cornell boxes as well as the grand-scale modern transition in art from the actual to abstraction.

Kasia Keeley has a starkly beautiful white on white depiction of farm out-buildings—a huddled group of corn storage structures—on a mid-distance horizon between a vast, snowy landscape and even more vast and desolate overcast sky.

Anne Mauser has two digital media book covers for pulp-thriller alternative Grimm’s Fairy Tales. One about Little Red Ridinghood in an identity theft plot, the other about a movie date from hell with the Frog Prince, with the subtitle “You want to come back to my pad later?”

In another work possibly reflecting fairy tales, or a fairy tale, Olga Bajusova has a small watercolor magic world depiction of a child and an apple tree loaded with red-ripe fruit, amid an otherwise wintry Alpine mountain scene.

And in a work evoking Victorian era hair memorial art, looking to the past, and looking to the present, cornrow hair fashions, Kat Delfosse has a delicate hair braid that gradually changes hue from golden blonde to brunette, framed under glass.

The WNYBAC members’ show continues through July 9.

—jack foran