At the CBAA Member Showcase, I had the pleasure of seeing more artist’s books by Robbin Ami Silverberg.
I don’t know her personally, but one of her books, A Week of Jewels, has really stayed with me since I first met her last year at Codex. A Week of Jewels, using Ms. Silverberg’s own words, is “a book about a minor event, a missing ring, that signifies loss.” Perhaps because a dear friend of mine is dealing with his mother’s dementia, and perhaps because we all worry about our parent’s forgetfulness, this book is poignant and universal. It is also beautifully made using Ms. Silverberg’s own handmade paper. (She runs a papermaking studio, Dobbin Mill.)
Also at Codex, I found Home Sweet Home to be interesting and thought-provoking. From Ms. Silverberg’s website, “For this book about the home, I “designed” an architectural album of an imaginary middle-class suburban house, filling its plans and layout with the many proverbs I’ve found about woman in the home. The book was printed to look like the almost obsolete Diazo printing (blue-printing), but in fact, is archival inkjet. The proverbs depict a prevailing misogyny that is as funny as it is painful.”
At the CBAA conference this year, I enjoyed a new-to-me work, Affadavit. Says Ms. Silverberg, “Istán Örkény’s story of the same name, from his collections of “One Minute Stories,” was the fillip for this small edition. This artist book about a ‘day in the life…’ of an artist spans segments of a day as seven statements of identity. Despite that each one ends with a declaration of forgery and fraud, Silverberg had them notarized by different notary officers. The process spurred discussions or even conflicts with the notary officers about identity. Each interaction was logged and described in the “Compendium to Affidavit”.
I find Robbin Ami Silverberg’s work to be strong in both content and form and encourage you to wander around her website to enjoy more of her many artists’ books.
This is the last blog post about the CBAA Member Showcase in which I’ll highlight an individual artist. Believe me there were many, many more artists that were more than deserving, these were just a few of the artists whose work spoke to me personally on that particular day. I’ll compile a list of some of the other artists and their websites so that you an experience more of the amazing work available for view at CBAA. I’ll also tell you more about the workshops and lectures that I attended and the interesting art that I was exposed to in those settings. Plenty more to tell you about CBAA. I’ll fit it in over the next few weeks.
~Ginger
Midnight Musings 