NINA KATCHADOURIAN Noguchi, 2021 (“Sorted Books” project, 2010 – ongoing) All photographs are: C-prints in a numbered edition of 8 + 2AP Sheet: 12 x 19 inches Frame: 13 5/8 x 20 1/8 inches Editions 1 – 5: $3,800; Editions 6 – 8: $5,800 *Prices above do not include shipping from New York; please allow up to 4 – 6 weeks for production Artist statement on Noguchi: In a 1962 interview, Isamu Noguchi said, “I always work with whatever medium is at hand. I don’t believe in sticking to one medium.”2 This has been my approach as well, and I’ve found that deliberately working with the limitations of the materials at hand has been productive for me. My ongoing project “Sorted Books” began in 1993 as an experiment that I undertook with a group of fellow graduate students in 1993, when we took over a friend’s parents’ house in the small coastal town of Half Moon Bay, in California, and made art for a week using only what we found in the house. I got interested in the couple’s books and spent a week rearranging them on the bookshelves. The basic rules of engagement have remained the same through many iterations of the project ever since: I limit myself to a particular collection of books and by organizing them into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, I construct phrases, stories, poems. I think of the project as a form of portraiture. Both through the books Noguchi collected and his writings about his own work, I was keenly aware of his own intense attention to what materials communicate. The most common misunderstanding about the “Sorted Books” project is that it’s only about language, and merely about the arranging of words. There is an absolutely elemental importance to engaging the books as physical objects: to consider height, width, heft, color, typeface, texture, gloss, damage, dust jacket. These things communicate in different ways than language can, and to me they are as big as part of how the images are “read” as the words on the spines or covers. I’ve seen paperbacks that are so banged up and mangled from reading that they look like they’ve been eaten alive, in fact, a reflection of the voracious way in which I imagined they had been handled. (Perhaps the most extreme
Nina Katchadourian: "Noguchi" in the series "Sorted Books," 2021
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.