Babel Revisited
Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban
SPACE is proud to present Babel Revisited – a collaboration between Austin, TX – based artist duo, Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban. Babel Revisited is a pop up exhibition on occasion of the New England Art Book Fair on view from October 6th through the 14th.
Mutchler and Urban will be giving a talk about Babel Revisted on Saturday October 7th, 11:30am. Both the talk and the New England Art Book Fair are free and open to all.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The book as a curated, collaborative and performed space is the subject of Babel Revisited by artist-collaborators Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban. Previously shown in Cork, Ireland, Babel Unbound will be adapted to SPACE as a way to activate the exhibition space during the New England Art Book Fair.
A series of printed works, risographs, xeroxes and screenprints become a publication pulled apart, ephemeral and in-flux, lining the walls of SPACE. 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.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
As artists and collaborators, Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban are interested in the handmade (handprinted) and the duality of actual and virtual, experience and meta-experience. Both have multiple degrees in printmaking and have been working for several years to make relevant the archaic and dying craft of print.
Mutchler’s recent projects are experiential and examine the functionality of the printed form through multi-participatory installations. Urban is co-founder and co-editor of Printeresting.org, a 2011 Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant winning blog, focused on interesting and relevant contemporary printmaking, print, and print-related issues. Both teach in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin where Mutchler is Associate Chair and Director of the AAH Core Program and Urban is Head of the Studio Division’s Print Area.
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