Two Collections

Mary Banas

I am interested in how images of a place can transcend the geography and become something more abstract and iconographic. With a focus on precedents, I will work with two artist books that have been important to me: Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha and Autobiography by Sol LeWitt. 

With Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations in mind I will re-interpret this work but substitute bodies of water: quarries, inlets, ponds, swimming pools, and streams on the island itself.

As a daily exercise, I will “re-write” LeWitt’s Autobiography by starting with high-resolution digital images of the book itself and then re-format, re-crop, re-organize, and re-design the content of the book itself, as well as folding in new content (found or autobiographical—TBD). One consideration will be “Every reference is the same size with no object in his space more important than another” (from the Amazon description of the book). This book is also an example of a collection providing a more contemplative read. I enjoy this book so much and I think it will be really pleasurable to spend some serious time studying it and working with and through the material of it.