O Reader, 2008

hand-cut adhesive shelf paper, rubber-stamped ink, laminated between three layers of mulberry paper, 8’ x 24’

 

I laminated the 2007 architectural installation O Reader within layers of fine Japanese paper to loosen it from its architectural structure, give it dimensionality, and make it more portable. The stamped images in the background transcribe, letter for letter, a passage from Italo Calvino’s novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler:

 

Lover’s reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear.  It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost…What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.