Ellie Brown 

Self-Titled Book Statement

The Self-Titled book series plays with the idea of a book and how one looks at it and receives information. The pages of the books are glued together to render it unopenable.  Inside the book, a portion is cut out to reveal a window of thought illustrated though collage.  The two-collaged pieces in the book work in both a juxtaposed and harmonic dialogue. By destroying the actual content of the book and adding my own in its place, I ask the viewer to question what information is gathered without the actual text of the book.  I have taken the power of director from the author for myself, hereby deciding how I believe the book should read based on a series of judgments.  In altering the intended content of the books, I have created a book- shelf that reflects my own desires and points of view.  As the viewer approaches the bookshelf, she expects an experience that in the end will differ from what actually occurs.  It is the tension between expectations and experience, information available and information withheld that exists between the cover and the inside of these altered books.

Most of the books I’ve chosen to alter reflect antiquated or stereotypical ideas about gender and sexuality. The books evoke a range of critical feelings in me that go from bemusement to anger. My collaged alterations challenge and mock the ideas presented on the books’ cover and with its original content. I do this in a way that creates a new text to soothe my questioning of the books’ original context. This lets me regain control of the content to suit my own views about gender and sexuality.

The left side of the slide image represents the cover of the book and the right side shows the only viewable inside.  The current manifestation of this work is in the form of Archival Epson Prints ranging in size from 13x19 to 20x26”. The prints look exactly as the slide images do, preserving most of the dimensionality and texture of the book through the scanning process. The prints remove the meaning and context of the book one step further making them a complement to the books that they are derived from.

www.elliebrown.com

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