O Reader, 2007

hand cut adhesive shelf paper on wall

8’ x 21’

 

This collage is based on images representing the seven letters of the title, one letter for each panel. It draws on a passage from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler:

And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific curiosities…

 

It was designed for the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art in New Harmony, Indiana, and hand cut from overlapping layers of adhesive shelf paper bought at my local hardware store. 

 

O READER was later re-installed at the Depree Art Center at Hope College in Holland, Michigan and then adapted as a laminated paper collage for the Morlan Gallery of Transylvania University in 2008.