#ArtsyFriday
Towards a Just Landscape is one of my favorite artists’ books; it encapsulates the ability and significance artists’ books have to be both powerful and beautiful objects. Beyond it’s beautifully rendered aesthetics of wilderness and the 49th Parallel, a 20-foot clear-cut section along the US-Canada International Boundary, it discusses issues of justice, history, identity, and political and ecological relationships with land. This assemblage was created by Anne Covell originally as a University of Iowa Center for the Book MFA thesis in 2014. Housed in a clamshell case finished with cork paper, Towards a Just Landscape incorporates a folded panoramic map, printed postcards, a saddle-sewn book with interleaved pages and excerpts from Nicholas Brown’s Ph.D. dissertation “Landscape, justice, and politics of indigeneity”, ‘A field guide to new growth’ in the style of a botanical guide, printed elements, and a 20 foot piece of twine. The ethereal transparency of paper in the interleaved book allows for images and text to be seen from a distance, with texts and traces of tepees and mountain peaks ghosting behind each other; this quote from Brown’s dissertation resonates throughout the piece and, if we listen, it’s readers:
“Yet specters will always penetrate a permeable membrane. If we wish to seek justice beneath the facade of peace, it is our responsibility to allow ourselves to be haunted by them.”
--Laura
x-Collection N7433.4 .C647 T69 2015
