#ArtsyFriday

Towards a Just Landscape is one of my favorite artists’ books; it encapsulates the ability and significance artists’ books have to be both powerful and beautiful objects. Beyond it’s beautifully rendered aesthetics of wilderness and the 49th Parallel, a 20-foot clear-cut section along the US-Canada International Boundary, it discusses issues of justice, history, identity, and political and ecological relationships with land. This assemblage was created by Anne Covell originally as a University of Iowa Center for the Book MFA thesis in 2014. Housed in a clamshell case finished with cork paper, Towards a Just Landscape incorporates a folded panoramic map, printed postcards, a saddle-sewn book with interleaved pages and excerpts from Nicholas Brown’s Ph.D. dissertation “Landscape, justice, and politics of indigeneity”, ‘A field guide to new growth’ in the style of a botanical guide, printed elements, and a 20 foot piece of twine. The ethereal transparency of paper in the interleaved book allows for images and text to be seen from a distance, with texts and traces of tepees and mountain peaks ghosting behind each other; this quote from Brown’s dissertation resonates throughout the piece and, if we listen, it’s readers: 

“Yet specters will always penetrate a permeable membrane. If we wish to seek justice beneath the facade of peace, it is our responsibility to allow ourselves to be haunted by them.” 

--Laura 

Xiyu Zhuan (Treatise on the Western Regions) in the Book of the Later Han (《後漢書·西域傳》). via Academica Sinica (Taipei) Digital Archive Modern online tools make pulling up and translation classic Chinese texts easy. Used cautiously some assisted intelligence (yours) tools can make extensive reading in languages you have some or limited knowledge of possible. I wonder if the breadth and depth of…