Books! Art! Words!

The Torpedo Factory's Target Gallery is currently hosting an exhibit that I knew I would have to go see: BookEnds. The show is a celebration of books and their use as inspiration for (and as actual components of) artworks. Pretty cool for those of us who like to play with words, and who have an affinity for books.

Books and art have a symbiotic relationship anyway: one accentuates the other. I have a tendency to add pictures or clip art to poems, to play with fonts and layouts when I'm printing them out. I am no artist, but I know that the way I arrange my words should be as pleasing to the eye as it is to the ear. It's all part of the same overall sensory experience that is what poetry is all about. So, when I see a container created on a lathe from a block of laminated pages, when I can see words in the walls of that container, appearing  like the grain in a piece of wood, I get excited. I know that words--and books, and poetry--have texture. They have taste and sound and smell and shape, and here is an artist who understands all that, and manages to put it all together. 

What's more, it's not just ONE artist, but a whole group of artists that is expressing different ideas about language and books and how they intersect with our lives. How amazing that there are people out there putting ideas about words into tangible, physical, meaningful forms that bring books off  dusty shelves and into the gallery.  It's a show that provokes thought, that raises questions, and that demonstrates the amazing creativity that can be unleashed by the perusal of a book.