Product Description
This is the catalog for Building / Books | Karen Wirth: A Retrospective Exhibition, on view in MCBA's Main Gallery and Outlook Gallery through June 8, 2025.
“ context
text
subtext
textural
textual
architectural
structural
instruct
So begins the word game that ascends across the pages of the Gail See Staircase, the sculptural stair that unites the organizations and the floors of the Open Book building in Minneapolis. The reader travels through hundreds of words that connect ideas about books and buildings while moving through space. This list is also an apt introduction to the way I think about space and place: fluid transitions from idea to form, layers of meaning, ways of telling and experiencing.
Building / Books celebrates one body of work developed over nearly 40 years. It began when I salvaged used roofing slate as raw material when I lived in Washington D.C., and was further informed when I photographed rapidly-built postmodern timber-framed houses while living in San Diego. It took form when I moved into a compact bungalow in Minneapolis.
I have experienced this architecture-related body over the years, and no matter the subject matter or the final form, books have been the anchor. Books are, like my work, the embodiment of thought. Time, sequence, directionality and immersion are essential elements that move a reader through the book, and also through physical space. I explore a very broad sense of place through close observation, research, and paying attention to human experience. I track and mark time as data collection. I am intrigued by naming conventions and taxonomies. I engage in metaphor in order to decipher layered relationships. I am drawn to simultaneity: seeing and being, appropriated words and found objects, sky/earth and clouds/rocks, roofs/covers and walls/pages. When I travel I explore cities on foot as much as possible, walking millions of footsteps, block by block. The destination is one element of the pedestrian journey that is framed by experiential and photographic investigation of changing neighborhoods, architectural scale and style, people in action, and most importantly, the details of life lived.
Throughout my practice, architecture has been both a subject matter for my books and sculptural works, and a discipline through collaborative projects. My ideation process relies on wondering and questioning, followed by visual and textual research. Art history and contemporary art, manifestos by architects, literary and linguistic theory all played a part. I am inspired by the flattened, condensed space, and the tilting hierarchical perspective of Persian miniatures and Duccio in the Middle Ages. I pay attention to sources such as Gordon Matta Clark’s deconstructions, Robert Rauschenberg’s The ¼ Mile, Sia Armajani’s Dictionary for Building series, and the public work of Mary Miss. I have been influenced by the writings of Yi-Fu Tuan, Rosalind Krause, along with Robert Harbison’s Thirteen Ways and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.
As an artist I am able to speculate widely and act with infinite flexibility. Most constraints are of my own making. When working with architects a other collaborators, speculation is as important, but it is more intertwined with the very real constraints of site, budget, client, zoning and code. However, boundaries give way to the openness of engaging others’ challenging ideas. rich conversations, and a complex process of making that cannot be done alone.
My solo and collaborative practices of books, sculpture and architecture have enhanced each other, supported by the simultaneity of thinking and making. Building / Books manifests these ideas and objects collectively for the first time.
The last pages of the word game on the staircase end like this:
knowledge
foreknowledge knowledgeable
foredge legible
forethought legibility
thought ability
Of course, if you are descending the staircase, this is the beginning, with a new journey and story to tell.” - Karen Wirth
10.5” x 8.25” x 0.5”
