Former NDP MP Peter Stouffer’s office, crammed full of baseball caps, lapel pins, and other ephemera. It’s almost as good as The Bookcase:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ex-mp-peter-stoffer-reflects-on-parliament-hill-career-1.3290996
Christof Migone: Millefeuille and Flipper A
Today is the last day to catch artist, curator, and professor Christof Migone’s installation in The Bookcase. Comprised of two works that comment on books, libraries, and collecting, Millefeuille and Flipper A bring to mind one of my all time favourite articles, Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library“: “This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
Millefeuille is a pile of one thousand blank pages torn from books in Migone’s library. Millefeuille in French literally means one thousand sheets, leaves or pages. It is also the name for a type of pastry. Migone writes, “Some books have no blank pages, quite a few have one in the front and one in the back, some have several. I rip all of the ones I find. On each page I write the title and author of the book it is torn from, then assemble the layers and serve this pastry to all the bibliophiles.” Millefeuille (2006) will be on display in the Bookcase while a second edition, Millefeuille 2 (2013) is showing at QueenSpecific in Toronto.
Flipper A (2007) is an audio flipbook of 99 books starting with the letter ‘A’ culled from the Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives of the Banff Center for the Arts. The recordings are left largely unaltered. The flipping action is miked closely in order to transpose physical materiality to the sonic realm. Each book’s weight, size, binding affects how a book will flip and consequently how a book sounds.
photos by Kim Neudorf
Penned Again: The Pen Collection of Dr. John Hatch
March 25-April 29
The Bookcase Micro-museum and Library
John Hatch writes of his collection of nearly 120 pens: “My collecting of pens started rather innocently with the gift of a couple of vintage pens from my father in the late 1970s. I do use every pen in my collection, rotating on a regular basis. I do still write a lot despite loving computers and mobile devices.” For the next five weeks, twenty-four pens selected from Dr. Hatch’s collection will be on display at the Bookcase, ranging from the Montegrappa Van Gogh Arles pen: “part of a line of pens by Montegrappa inspired by artists, this one’s colour is a resin transcription of the colour palette of Van Gogh’s painting Bedroom in Arles (1888)” to the striped pattern of the Pelikan Ductus (shown above), which “came to be referred to unofficially as the Stresemann, named after the Weimar foreign minister Gustav Stresemann who was famous for his pinstripe suits.” A full itemized catalogue with information on each pen accompanies the show.
photos by Jennifer Martin
Touching History
There’s a new exhibition opening February 4 (12-4)
Touching History
Rehab Nazzal
How does it feel to be tending your ancient olive grove, on a Spring day, in the land known by its inhabitant as the “mother of all beginnings and of all endings,” when suddenly your fingers touch clay pots made some 1700 years ago? What feelings do you experience when touching items created and used by your ancestors in the 3rd century?
The objects in this exhibition were found in Palestine ten years and three wars ago, buried under the red Mediterranean soil in a family olive grove located in the northern part of the country. Only olive trees, in their tranquility in place and the passages of time, can truly tell the real story of these objects. Only the olive trees can testify as to whether these objects were buried with deceased ancestors, to serve them in the afterlife (as archeologists claim), or were buried as a result of violence of war, along with those who had made them. These objects have traces from the Roman Empire and the consequent rising and failing empires in Palestine. Their texture, color, shape and fractures are testament to the life that existed there, and to the fragility of our own existence.
As part of a personal collection, these objects defy any monetary value that is attached to such items and resist commodification. They can be smelled, touched, or just looked at. Their display in the Bookcase micro-museum can convey the connection between knowledge and living and surviving. Knowledge and food nurture the mind and the body: feeding the mind, feeding the body, these are proverbs known by all cultures.
photos by Jennifer Martin, 2015
The Bookcase is closed for the holidays
and will re-open January 14 (closed January 7 for a snow day!)
Concert Air
The second exhibition at The Bookcase will open Wednesday, November 26, at 12pm.
Concert Air
What is the point at which fandom becomes obsession? Music fandom is often portrayed as a relatively acceptable form of passionate addiction, although such fixation tends to be more surprising when the bands in question are pop acts like Hanson, the Moffatts and Hilary Duff. Concert Air documents Londoner Laura Mundinger’s obsession with sugar pop bands and the alternate reality they offered: one where the difficulties of daily existence, bullying and disaffection could be actively avoided. The Concert Air exhibition includes water bottles used to capture the air at concerts (a literal attempt to collect atmosphere), key chains and knick knacks with the name “Bob” (for Bob Moffatt), dozens of movie tickets for Hilary Duff movies (with dates on the tickets clearly showing that films were often viewed numerous times in a single day), and Greyhound tickets for concerts in London, Guelph, Toronto and elsewhere. When Southwest Ontario tours for these bands took place, Mundinger would attend every show within a 5-hour radius, experiencing the identical set list, often multiple times in the same week. “Her every movement was choreographed,” Mundinger says of Hilary Duff. “Near the end of each tour I could mirror her [movements] from the audience.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a mouth retainer, into the resin of which Mundinger convinced her dentist to incorporate a picture of Bob Moffatt, such that fandom could be literally taken into the body. In Concert Air, fandom is innocent and active, obsessive and taxonomic. From collecting the air of fantasy moments to the flesh-on-plastic integration of the singer of a boy band, this exhibition documents the extents of fandom, and the archiving impulse to hang on to those souvenirs and memories years after the actual events.
Concert Air will be on view at The Bookcase Micro Museum and Library until January 15, 2015. The Bookcase is located in Office 221 in the JLVAC. It is open Wednesdays 12-4.
photos by Jennifer Martin, 2014
A Mysterious Sighting
This is the dedication page for a second-hand book the library received today. Maybe you’ll be the lucky one who finds this when you’re browsing!
Old School Library Cards
The library received a treat in the mail today!
The Discipline of DE
At the preview opening, several people noted the pristine covers and uncracked spines of many of the books in the library. Jokes were made about how many of the books I’d actually read (most of them, I swear), but it’s true; I am extremely careful with my things. I read books without fully opening them, I rarely fold the page corners, I never leave them open on the table, and I dust the bookcases in my office. But there’s a secret library here too. There are a few books with coffee stains, a few that are a little rough around the edges from having been moved multiple times, and if people find the right books they might find photos stuck between the pages. They might also find the evidence of a phase I went through, sometime in grad school, when I would write down what was happening around me as I read the book (there is a lady in a red jacket sitting across from me on the train, while outside a horse runs by in a field). Part of this project was to find some kind of a balance between owning and looking after a collection, and sharing material objects that I care about. Some of the books are protected – they won’t leave the library. But I’m all right with others coming back with folded pages, cracked spines, and maybe, maybe with someone else’s notes tucked between the pages or written in the margins.
It is a year since I undertook a residency at Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina, which was one of the main inspirations for the Bookcase. On the first day, the introduction consists of watching this early Gus van Sant film with the other visiting artists. I think DE got into my system, and it certainly summarizes my approach to objects and things:
Official opening….
The Bookcase 
You must be logged in to post a comment.