| Please join us in congratulating Brian Dettmer for the recent review by Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. You may read the review in it's entirety immediately below or by clicking here. The work will be on view through March 31st, 2012. 
Brian Dettmer - From One to Zero, 2012
Galleries - Kenneth Baker
Kenneth Baker
Saturday, February 11, 2012
The book autopsied: Turn off that e-reader and see Atlantan Brian Dettmer's show of recent book works at Toomey Tourell.
Dettmer takes old books - he favors encyclopedias for their wealth of illustrations - and treats them as ready-made, if massively thick, collages. He cuts surgically into their tissue of text and image to expose an anatomy of verbal and pictorial connections largely unintended and unforeseen by the books' producers. Intentionally or not, he creates an archaeology of the hyperlink.
"From One to Zero" (2012), one of Dettmer's simpler pieces, consists of a single excavated volume accompanied by a framed sheet that puts its exposed text on a common plane.
Like several other pieces in the show, it brings to mind Joseph Cornell's box assemblages, except that Cornell (1903-1972) installed nearly every scavenged component of his constructions, whereas Dettmer appears to have discovered his awaiting repatterning by excision and exposure.
Viewers not welcoming the eclipse of the book may find elegiac notes in Dettmer's work. But I see in it a kind of defense: It declares the centrality of spatial feeling and spatial memory in involvement with a book that has no parallel in the dimensionless realm of e-reading.
Forthcoming Exhibition at Toomey Tourell: Artists and show title: New Things We Like - A non exclusive sampling of several of the artists included: Nicholas Bodde, Mark Evans. Andrew Mezvinsky, Andy Moses, Suzann Woodruff, Ned Wyss Dates of exhibition and opening: 04.03.12 - 04.30.12, artist's reception 04.05.12 |
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