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Past
Exhibitions
Bookworm:
Photographs by Rosamond Purcell
4 September- 16 December 2007
Foucaults
Pendulum |
In
her 1977 essay On Photography, Susan Sontag
insisted that “what a photograph is of is always
of primary importance. . . . We don’t know
how to react to a photograph . . . until we know
what piece of the world it is.” The abstraction
of objects as we know them is what draws us to Rosamond
Purcell’s photographs. |
What is so
striking about Bookworm, Purcell’s latest publication,
is that we recognize what we are seeing and at the same time
we do not recognize it at all. Yale English professor John
Crowley writes, “Rosamond Purcell’s photographs—all
still lifes—are of things, and they are usually things
we recognize, whether we have encountered them before or not;
but our recognition is undermined because we don’t know
how they got that way.” “How they got that way” is
precisely what makes them so intriguing to the viewer.
Literary
critic Sven Birkerts remarked about Purcell’s images,” At
first I was drawn by way of light, color, and sharply textured
shapes into what seemed to be some kind of excavation site.” Many
of the photographs in Bookworm represent books and “book-like
things,” as she calls them, in various states of decomposition
and recomposition. They are ruins, but not of the kind excavated
by archaeologists. Instead, these ruins were created by the
industrious excavations of insects and rodents, shipworms,
termites, and mice. Her photograph, Foucault’s Pendulum,
is one of those images that haunted Birkert after seeing them
for the first time: “When I say that the work haunted
me, I mean that it stuck in my mind for days as a charged retinal
after-image.”
Serving as
curator to the objects and materials that she photographs,
Purcell manipulates these images in a different way than in
her previous work. “My process of working with words
and pictures,” she writes, “is like assembling
a masticated language; a rebus-language made of letters and
images. I took a cue from the mouse(or mice) that had consumed
half of [the book] Flying Hostesses of the Air and
assembled a structure of syllables and straw. I built new forms
from fragments…. My job is to rip, soak, break, align,
realign, burnish, and glue.” The end result is an extraordinary
compilation of images that each draw on the “symbolic
potency” of lettered pages and, in so doing, add to it.
Bookworm:
Photographs by Rosamond Purcell is offered as part of
Museum 10’s BookMarks, a celebration of word
and image. For more information on Bookmarks and Museum
10, visit www.museum10.org.
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