Project: Artifact
Project: Artifact
- Creator: William (Bill) Lewis
- Date: 2008
- Location: Library! at Hillcrest
- Types: paintings (visual works)
- Materials: oil paint (pigmented coating), wood (plant material)
- Collection: Site-Based Works
Anyone with access to the Internet has a vast library at his/her fingertips. The entire collected works of the ancient world can now be held in the palm of one’s hand. However, I do not believe this makes libraries obsolete. Nor do I think that because of the advent of new media painting has become obsolete. The physicality and presence of actual books and paintings imbues them with a special significance for me. In our digital age perhaps their importance becomes even greater. This series of [31] small paintings takes the physical apparatus associated with writing and printing (presses, typewriters, etc.) as its subject. Though regarded as outdated by most people (and not even recognized by others), these machines and objects have interesting and resonant plastic qualities. Their forms remind one of the extraordinary and vital endeavor of human literacy and the evolution of design. Though the Internet means we are but a keystroke away from a picture of virtually anything, these images feel to me rather cold, distant and disembodied. I hope in some way my paintings re-materialize those things depicted– plucking them from the ocean of The Web and making something substantial of them. Perhaps this reflects how people use libraries. Each person who reads a book uses it idiosyncratically – recycling the information. The supports of the paintings also represent a kind of reclamation. The panels were salvaged from alleys, demolition sites and scrap piles – pieces of wood that bear the marks of former uses, now employed in a new way. One piece even came from the site of this library. This series enacts a tension and reconciliation between the old and new, and represents that nothing is truly obsolete. Everything is open to imaginative renovation.
