The Bookcase Micromuseum and Lending Library is now dormant until September, 2019.
Sweet Dreams: A Hibernation Party
On March 28, 2018, the Bookcase Micromuseum and Lending Library will go into hibernation mode for 18 months. When it wakes up in September, 2019, the exhibition space will host a series of exchanges with other micromuseums, located in Canada and elsewhere.
From 11-4 on Wednesday March 28, in office 221 of the JLVAC, there will be cake, lullabies, bedtime stories, dreams for the museum, and a sleuth of hibernating bears (via livestream). Please feel free to stop by, and come and learn a bit about the Bookcase before it goes temporarily dormant.
Long in the Tooth … Yadda Yadda
curated by Christine Negus
November 29-January 30, 2017-18.
“I like the idea of the persistence of teeth. In true crime shows, for instance, a body is often found, and eventually identified through the dental records. There’s some kind of permanence to these tiny things that require so much care, that need flossing and cleaning every day. But ultimately, they are the last thing standing. Over the years I’ve collected human teeth, I’ve made teeth from ceramics, I’ve collected tooth-themed jewellery, and I’ve found toothy animal remains in “death flea markets” in the Western United States, where you can buy bits and parts of things.” Unsettling and funny at once, Long in the Tooth … Yadda Yadda is a toothy-assed grin, a jaw breaker, a chatterbox, a gummer, the whining echo of the dentist drill. Some discomfort may be expected.
>100,000,000
Social Emergency Response Centre
“Social Emergency Response Centre, one day event in collaboration with S.E.R.C. (Boston) and the Chicago Protest Banner Lending Library, April 12, 2017.
Natural Histories: the Collection as Narrative
March 8, 2017-April 12, 2017
Helen Gregory presents a selection of bookworks and objects drawn from her own collection to explore the relationships among the souvenir, the natural history collection, the cabinet of curiosities, and the travel diary. Bones, skulls, molted carapaces, and disembodied chicken feet are not only metonymically connected to the animals that they were once a part of, but also act as souvenirs of the circumstances under which they found their way into Gregory’s collection. Lacking any sort of collection data, these specimens are scientifically irrelevant and their value exists only in their nostalgic connection to an increasingly ephemeral set of memories. Each object is a souvenir of a particular moment in time, associated with a place, a person, and a shifting emotional response. The bookworks are an extension of the collection and are part of a project that has been ongoing for over 25 years. Constructed from handmade paper, silk, acrylic mediums, soil, plants, small bones, and other found objects from nature culled from the places where Gregory has lived, they function as both reliquaries and travelogues.
The Bookcase catalogue is here!
Featuring essays by Genevieve Flavelle and Keely McCavitt, as well as summaries of all of the exhibitions from 2014-2016, the lavishly illustrated Bookcase catalogue is available at the link below, free of charge.
Click on this link to see it as a downloadable pdf:
Joy of Atleigh and catalogue launch
Join us on January 25th for the opening of the exhibition “Joy of Atleigh,” guest-curated by graduate student Beatriz Asfora, and for the launch of the first Bookcase catalogue, featuring essays by Genevieve Flavelle and Keely McCavitt.
“The Joy of Atleigh” is a conceptual YouTube video project begun by artist Atleigh Homma in 2016. “The Joy of Atleigh” uses the format of the popular make-up tutorial to question stereotypes of race, gender, and identity, both in terms of the artworld and in terms of the consumption of YouTube videos. In each video, Homma uses the tutorial format to talk about art supplies, or to instruct the viewer on how to paint a representational portrait, all the while simultaneously (though subtly) encouraging the audience to question popular culture’s relationship to high art and kitschy “girly” objects. The format of the videos is instantly recognizable to those familiar with popular phenomena such as “Beauty Hauls” and “The Boyfriend Tags.” Homma plays on these tropes in the titles of videos such as “My Boyfriend Does My Portrait,” referencing the popular “My Boyfriend Does My Makeup,” and “Five Favorite Art Supplies,” which references “Five Favorite Makeup Products.” Homma is intentional in creating a character with a “girly” sensibility in order to criticize how people associate “likes,” “subscribers,” or “pink backgrounds” with her status as both a woman and an artist. The work challenges us to analyze our own stereotypes of gender and femininity and their relationship to art.
Fall Exhibitions
Over the Fall semester, the Bookcase held two small exhibitions: “Hello Heidelberg,” curated in response to “Goodbye Heidelberg” in the Concourse Gallery at JLVAC, and an exhibition of bookworks from students registered in the Masters of Library Studies.
Someone Else’s Reverie
Someone Else’s Reverie consists of miniatures that artist and curator Jenna Faye Powell has been collecting for the past twelve years. After the “great miniature purge” of 2015, these objects were kept purely for sentimental reasons. Many of these miniatures were acquired or built for Powell’s 2012 MFA graduating exhibition Welcome to Chesterfield, where they were used as models for her paintings. Chesterfield is a fictional city. It is an illusory place Powell lovingly created to support and develop the many aesthetic, theoretical, and historical inquiries she has around the middle class lifestyle in the suburbs – its perks, its privileges. Chesterfield is constantly changing and adapting to suit her interests. It is a place brimming with mundane everydayness; it is both fantastical and pathetic, full of romance and familiarity. But, Chesterfield is not all laughter and sunshine. From gentrification to poor air quality, Chesterfield is known to absorb real-life problems. The creation story of Chesterfield is one full of contradictions, irony (and failed irony), autobiographical confessions, illusions and allusions, and unguided exploration: Welcome to Chesterfield.
images by Julia Beltrano
The Bookcase 
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