Iterating on the many meanings of the frame, the seated forms, a collaboration with San Francisco artist Jeffrey Bennett Allen, luminesce and seduce with a raw, shimmering appliqué of reflective insulation manipulated by hand for tactility and volume, reiterating the reflexivity of both the artist’s book and one’s own optical observations. In transitional moments, atmospheric soundscapes invoke sites and experiences in the city, echoing the wilding of imagination that attends the literary medium. A field of forms occasioning rest and stasis—during liminal states, casual conversations, and official fair programming—offers opportunities for independent or intimate engagement.
A wilding of imagination
Less a physical space than a sensory threshold, the Lounge at the San Francisco Art Book Fair conjures ancestries of creation, community, and reflection, manifesting radical, multimodal, contemporary exchange.
Location
San FranciscoCA
Year
2022
Area
600 ft2 / 55 m2
As a channel for collective consciousness, the Lounge locates talks and improvisational performances sharing ideas for alternative knowledge production and communal sustenance. As a speculative project, it engages the reflexivity of the artist’s book, in both conception and consumption, sequencing new spatial possibilities for narrative forms and the making of meaning.
Elegant in their simplicity, draped canvas swathes the walls and a suspended armature hangs pendulous above, contouring a body for ambient visuals that textures hyperlocal architectures in which the book is sensuous or summoned. The clarity of their surfaces delimits distractions, catalyzing a calming contemplative state synchronous with reading.
