The eNotes Blog Bibliolandscapes The Art of GuyLaramee

Bibliolandscapes The Art of GuyLaramee We all have created mental landscapes of the literary places we love Pemberly, Maycomb, West Egg. But artist Guy Laramee has taken his vision of places and   things to construct three dimensional canvasses out of actual books. By pressing books together with clamps, the pages and covers become hard as wood.   Laramee then uses standard woodworking tools,   including a sandblaster, to create his miniature universes. How long each sculpture takes is dependent on its depth of detail, ranging from about two days to four months. Asked to explain his craft and concept, Laramee finds it difficult to fully articulate. However, here his his Artist Statement: The erosion of cultures – and of â€Å"culture† as a whole is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures arise, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might say: so what? Do we really believe that â€Å"new technologies† will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts ? When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination. My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is â€Å" All Ideas Look Alike†. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only â€Å"What† we think, but â€Å"That† we think. 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. After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: To project us into this thick Cloud of Unknowing. So far, there are two complete series of landscapes, Biblios and The Great Wall. Here are some images from both projects. You can see all of Laramees work at his website.