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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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0 degrees (2001)

0 Degrees (2001)

0 degrees of existence

Materials: book work, hand printed book (40 pages), 13 plates with double pages in organza, edition of 1, table, 6 video vignettes loops/ projections, 2000

Table measurements 76.2 x106.7 68.6cm, book 35.5 x 50.8 x 5.1cm

Excerpt from Turning, an essay by Anna Carlevaris.

“a hand-bound and silk screened book made of paper and organza, contains architectural plans and engineering guideline for the building of a canal. But the logic of the book’s rational assertions is interrupted by the video taped images being projected upon its surface. The video tape, in black and white, show a woman’s hand turning the same pages of the book we have before us, the hands (those of the artist’s mother) seem to float across the surface of the pages, doubling realities before our eyes. Other scenes, a young woman wading into a river, water rushing from an open tap, are accompanied by the sound of running water. The title of the book, 0 degrees of existence, refer to birth as the starting point of all the stories we tell ourselves and the world.

Selected Essay – Excerpts from Dream Ecology

CCCA Database