Continuing through August 2, 2025
“There is no emergency nor any day that does not require poetry.”
—Jill Lepore, “In Case of Emergency: One Hundred Days, One Hundred Classics,” The New Yorker.
Jill Lepore wrote this line as a final panacea in a long and thoughtful New Yorker essay, expressing her melancholic response to the state of the world. In need of a diversion, she reached for a Penguin Classic on her nightstand — a small book intended to delight and console — and retreated into a familiar story. These legendary tales help make sense of the endlessly unfolding present.
I was reminded of this potential when I first walked through “Turning the Page,” which was curated by Donna Seager. In that show I encountered Maria Park’s “Cover 10” and “Cover 5” (2013) — two small, unassuming images that indirectly reference this Penguin Book Cover series. Regrettably, despite their distinguished allusions, Park’s minimalist reverse-painted glass pieces are installed like gateposts on either side of Brian Dettmer’s “Horticulture.” The piece is an intricately layered garden that unfolds over three adjoining books. The black-and-white images that comprise Dettmer’s garden, interwoven with oversized red strawberries. It all evokes fairy tales — made even more surreal by their pairing with Park’s minimalist abstractions.
Despite this jarring point of entry, the exhibition offers an intriguing sampling of seven artists who use books as their medium and message. Among the standout works is Emily Payne’s “Teem” (2020), a large abstract composition created with graphite on book boards. Payne arranges the boards diagonally, creating a dynamic play of light and shadow with oblique lines and shapes that rise dramatically in space. The result evokes a wall of windows or tall buildings seen from below. Her contrasting yellow-beige and black graphite palette augments the effect of reflected light.
Using a different but equally thoughtful approach, Renee Bott plays with perception in works that meld image and text on toned Japanese paper. In “Fact and Fiction” (2024) a centrally placed white tree filled with religious narratives is counterbalanced by a sweeping arc of text describing Jupiter’s orbit. The inscription “AD 1556” in the corner suggests that we are peering through a telescope into the past. In “Willow, Willow” (2025), Bott’s use of muted color and balanced composition on book pages evokes a quiet, contemplative effect. Similarly, Gale Antokal’s collages “Emergency Exit (Uscita di Sicurezza)” and “Judith’s Hair (La Chioma di Giuditta)” (both 2024) repurpose 17th-century atlas plates into diary or scrapbook pages. Their faded imagery feels subdued, but their titles imply displacement and peril — ongoing exoduses, crossings, and danger. Very much of the present.
Andrew Hayes’ book sculptures offer a distinct approach: his work centers on the book as a physical object. His separation of form and content is matched by his pairing of book objects with metal to create new sculptural forms. Hayes’ idiosyncratic approach is exemplified in pieces like “Section” (2018), where he melds a crescent-shaped dictionary fragment with curved steel to form a circle. The book’s red finger tabs are not just visual punctuation. They underscore his interest in design. In “Canyon” (2020), Hayes has paired a shaped steel form with a book segment that resembles wood grain, highlighting his fusion of sculpture and narrative.
After spending time with the exhibition, I found myself growing ambivalent towards Brian Dettmer’s technically virtuosic, altered book works. While I admire their complexity, they feel visually and conceptually dizzying. However, his wordplay in “Spellage” (2020), with images literally spilling from a Standard Dictionary, is striking — and clearly aligned with a deeper socio-political critique of American culture. Barbara Wildenboer, a South African artist, takes a similarly layered approach, cutting and collaging photographs with images of animals, nature, women, planes, tanks, and bombs. Her analog methods create profoundly unsettling meditations on the human condition.
Ultimately, I’m left wondering whether these artists are literally “turning the page” — a phrase that typically suggests moving beyond hardship, difficulty, or unplanned situations in order to start fresh. Trying something new is usually a part of that. While creative expression alone can’t repair the world, history shows us that art and books and music offer tools that are indispensable for imagining how to think, live, and survive differently. And so, I return to Lepore’s recommendation: “There is no emergency nor any day that does not require poetry.”
