Library

Though I did not think of it at the time, Library has turned out to be my first artist’s book, or book work. It was created for the exhibition Paper Invitational, curated by John Chandler at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art. As I write in the notes on Reading the Landscape, the paper material for Library was recycled from the drawings in the Site Specific exhibition at Bellarmine College. I reimagined them as newspaper pages, and added text copied from local newspapers overlaid with a thick crust of oil pastel, so that the text is illegible. The pages are 36 inches wide on the outer layer, and change sequentially as they move inward, becoming 1 inch narrower and 1 inch longer, until the innermost page measures 1 inch wide and 36 inches long. The overall structure resembles a temple bell, and is suspended from the ceiling with tarred yacht marline.

“But if we think of the holiness of paper, we probably return to the book, to the Bible, Torah or Koran. . . . Dudley Zopp’s Library is the one that speaks to the question of holiness and words. It is a massive construction of hanging pages, many of them written on, created like a four-sided inverted pyramid. The pages hang the way newspapers hang in libraries and old cafés, attached to wooden poles, only Zopp’s poles are flat sticks painted red, moving up and in to the center of this frame. The words are smudged over, not really intended to be read, though I detected references to the cultural revolution and China.”
— Donna Gold, “Paper proves it’s more than a medium,” Maine Times, 12.25.1997