LEXICON
An exhibition of reworked pages from Chambers's English dictionary
– London, 1898
Gallery @ city library, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
1st–30th August, 2006
An exhibition of reworked pages from (a palimpsest of accidental extractions)
the Chambers's English Dictionary – London, 1898
A group exhibition curated by Martina Copley
John Abbate, Jennifer Bartholomew, Damiano Bertoli, Sue Boucher, Elizabeth
Boyce, Sandra Bruce, Louisa Bufardeci, Jen Cabraja, Angela Cavalieri,
Martina Copley, Craig Easton, Simone Ewenson, Anna Finlayson, Prudence
Flint, Natasha Frisch, Tara Gilbee, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison,
Tobias Hengeveld, Heather Hesterman, Ann Holt, Ruth Johnstone, Nicholas
Jones, Kate Just, Dawn Kanost, Lori-Jean Kirk, Cassandra Laing, Alex
Martinis Roe, Brandt McCook, Julie-Anne Milinski, Annee Miron, Claire
Mooney, Christine Morrow, Geoff Newton, Pandarosa, Alex Pittendrigh,
Stephanie Radok, Carly Richardson, Steven Rendall, Louise Rippert, Janita
Ryan, Elissa Sadgrove, Alex Selenitsch, Sandra Selig, Heather Shimmen,
Julia Silvester, Lynette Smith, Masato Takasaka, Sally Tape, Nadine
Renee Treister, Emma van Leest, Elke Varga, Carmel Wallace, Darren Wardle,
Gary Wheeler, Ilka White, Clare Whitney, Sarah Woods
Perfect bound with 1255 numbered pages, printed in London,
1898, bought by a friend for $20 in a second hand bookstore is an edition
that now has the aura of a unique object. Signs of use and accident
— stains and tears, jottings and yellow-edged pages — mark
the book as integral with its material history, suggesting a world in
which the reference book is now an artifact of wisdom. A communal
archive of shared knowledge, symbolic of the library and its holdings,
the lexicon bears witness to old belief systems still functioning through
language.
The intimate boundaries of its form — finitude and sequence,
repetition and extension — provide the spatial gestalt
for the exhibition. Dismantled and reconstrued, its integrative internal
structure sits like a collaged landscape of language. A found poem -
an arbitrary gesture in the rooms of a bibliotech — the
'absent text' of the dictionary is now playfully rendered in textual,
visual and material manipulations of the original pages.
Artists respond to the codified formal elements of the page —
margin, head, gutter, type, text block, illustration, running head...
and to the binarism of black ink on white paper. But words seep through,
along with their labyrinthine associations. There is a tension between
the literal and conceptual page as artists play with the sonoric and
visual aspects of language that form part of the substance of the dictionary
substrate.
Full
list of works
gallery
@ city library
Not a pipit
Single
color lithographic offset print hand colored with pencil and collage
on spicers cotton 270gsm.
Image size, 36cm x 20cm, paper size 46cm x 26cm.
Printed by Redwood Prints.
2006.
Gracia
Haby & Louise Jennison
Not a pipit (detail)
2006
lithographic offset print