The House Is in the Book (2021)
My four folios, along with four from a Jerusalem-based artist and four from a Buenos Aires-based artist, comprise “The House Is in the Book: Collaboration in Isolation.” Created during Covid, our artist’s book explores the notion of personal space (four cubits = six feet) in Jewish tradition. Separated by continents and time zones we worked alone in our studios. In my folios, there are four-sided structures, suggesting both constraint and openness. Other references include phases of the moon, four seasons, four matriarchs, and the text inside a four-compartment cube: “books have their fates.” Along the bottom are words connected to separation/isolation and numbers counting out the day: al-arba-iniya (forty days of separation from the community when seriously ill, according to Ibn Sina, noted scholar and physician of the Muslim world), quarantena (the forty days sailors had to wait on their ship in Venice until they were allowed to come on shore) along with “forty days of solitude.”
In the permanent collections of:
Rare Books and Special Collections, The Library of Congress
Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan
Michigan State University Library
