Previously shown in Cork, Ireland, Babel Unbound will be adapted to Space gallery to become Babel Revisited, activating the exhibition space during the New England Art Book Fair. A collaboration between UT Austin Studio Art faculty Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban, Babel Revisited opens on Friday, Oct. 6 and will be followed by an artist talk with Urban and Mutchler on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2017. The exhibition will be on view from Oct. 6 - 14, 2017.
Babel Revisited focuses on the book as a curated, collaborative and performed space. A series of printed works, risographs, xeroxes and screenprints become a publication pulled apart, ephemeral and in-flux, lining the walls of Space gallery. Photographs, large-scale digital prints, and faux-neon signage break up the monotony of the splayed publication and help to loosely connect, by thread, by memory, by mark, pieces of text, re-paginated essays, screen-captured images, and scans of book spreads. The gallery becomes a circular space without hierarchy; with no beginning and no end; a confused noise made by a number of voices.
Performing the Book, a single-channel video, explores both the tactile handling of loose pages, while bound, and references the magenta-fingered scanning process at Google Books Library Project. With the book in motion, relationships emerge and dissipate within seconds, making the magic of browsing visible and highly aesthetic.
Later in the month, Urban and Mutchler will exhibit of strange shadows in the Visual Arts Gallery at University of Illinois Springfield, IL, opening Oct. 26, 2017. The exhibition will be on view from Oct. 26 – November 16, 2017.
From the press release:
of strange shadows is an investigation of color, print and collective memory. Contrasting a subdued primary palette with gray images of residual protest and violence, artist-collaborators Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban look back to the 1960’s and 1970's as captured in printed matter from the same era. The installation of layered digital prints evoke the smoking and obscured remnants of a civil strife and political tumult at once too familiar and yet distant. The layering of large-scale, abstracted images printed on everyday bond paper suggests the ephemerality and fragility of any one generation’s defining moments.