Category: conceptual

Jared Bark began stacking books in the fields around his farm before transforming them into sculptures in his studio. Book of Stacks, Stacks of Books brings together, for the first time, a decade of his creations.

American artist Jared Bark began putting up stacks of books in the fields and woods on his farm in 2012. All he had was an image in his mind’s eye of a column of books standing at the edge of a field sur-rounded by trees. After working on the outdoor stacks, Jared Bark brought the project indoors to his studio, making all sorts of different stacks: colourful ones, burned ones, effaced one… More recently, Bark has been constructing vertical stacks of books that are then run through a sawmill to become acant, a term for a log that has been milled on all four sides. The slender verticality of the sculptures reference both the trees from which paper is made and the ancient freestanding columns Bark experienced in Pompeii. Book of Stacks, Stacks of Books gathers for the first time in a book a comprehensive selection of the stacks Bark has been making over the past decade.

Biography

Jared Bark (born in 1944 in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA) splits his time between New York City and his farm in Warwick, NY, where he has lived with his wife, painter Lois Lane, since 1981. Jared Bark is an artist known for his diverse range of activities and media.  Performance, body art, chance procedures, and minimalist abstraction all appeared and often merged within his works.

Constance Guisset’s pencil drawings are coloured spectrums and forms that move slowly, almost like ghosts floating across the white, then black, space of the page.

Constance Guisset draws. Oftentimes at the studio, as a starting point for an idea that will turn into a design object or scenography. But drawing also comes along as time stands still, away from any duty or purpose. It is not about drawing at work anymore, but drawing to break free. Corps flottants is a series born out of this spontaneity: it was at the sea that these “ghosts of lockdown”, as Constance Guisset likes to call them, first took shape. This book, deliberately exempt of any text, offers a space of free expression for these pencil drawings. Mischievous and colourful ghosts float and shift throughout the pages, until they become illuminated bodies on pitch black pages. As one puts the book away, the drawings leave an imprint on the vision, like the evidence of a memory that even the motion of the sea cannot completely wipe out.

Using traditional techniques like embroidery, cutting, and collage, Julie Cockburn enhances abandoned photos she collects, giving them a second life and adding a layer of mystery to their forgotten past.

“Stickybeak” is Julie Cockburn’s first comprehensive monograph.
The book coincides with Cockburn’s solo show “Telling it slant” at Flowers Gallery in London, UK (12 September-2 November 2019)

We are all stickybeaks to some extent. Many of my fictional heroes and heroines spend their time sleuthing or, at the very least, nosing around in other people’s business; Miss Marple, Lieutenant Columbo, Margo Leadbetter. There are even tales of espionage in my not so distant family history. Anyone with a social media account engages in a bit of stickybeakery – it’s human nature to be inquisitive.

The works in this book were made over a period of twelve years, some one-off experiments, others part of ongoing series that I add to over time. Each piece began with the search for the perfect image, setting some vaguely rigorous parameters for myself. I selected used postcards, old photographs, foxed bookplates and my own childhood drawings. And each of these foundlings had a different history, an unknown or forgotten story to tell. By submitting to my interventions, they transformed from silent, redundant, orphans into material objects with a regenerated heartbeat.

I see this book as a continuation of that process. The publishers rooted through the hundreds of images in my archive in the same way I sift through pages of online marketplaces or the jumbled tables at car boot fairs. My industrious hand embroidery and intricate collages are given a light touch here, the sequence of the images alluding to a gentle, humorous narrative. We will all read it differently, pausing on those pieces that speak the loudest to us, in our own preferred language. But broadly, this whittled selection, our chosen game of consequences, investigates how we see ourselves and each other, and the multi-layered ambiguity of life.

Julie Cockburn