Turning the written, and well, then printed, word into sculpture. This takes the idea and art of the set design model into new territory.
Artist Guy Laramee has carved a series of hardcover Chinese and English encyclopedias into stunning landscapes for two series entitled The Great Wall and Biblios.
His metaphor is scary and a bit of a wake-up call. His execution meticulous.
For almost 30 years, multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramee has worked as a stage writer, director, composer, a fabricator of musical instruments, a singer, sculptor, painter and writer. Among his sculptural works are these two incredible series of carved book landscapes and structures, where he excavates and shapes the dense pages of old books into serene mountains, plateaus, and ancient structures. We’re sure he was also a set designer.
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.
Laramee’s next showing will be in April of 2012 at the Galerie d’Art d’Outremont in Montreal.
Click the links for more views of these incredible and thought provoking works.
