| Joyce Cutler-Shaw ~ California | |
Bookworks about New York City |
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Into Flight 4.75" x 7" closed, extends to 11". Panoramic slide-out box. Black-and-white illustrations. Signed and numbered by the artist. Joyce Cutler-Shaw: "'Into Flight' is a sculpture installation commissioned for The White Sands of La Jolla ["continuing care retirement living"]. On January 7, 2008, The White Sands of La Jolla dedicated the newly installed courtyard sculpture titled, 'Into Flight' .... The sculpture rises to sixteen feet on two slender, round steel curving tubular forms, or "trunks", that intersect at twelve feet above ground to support a crown or "nest" of interlaced rods alighted with five cut steel silhouettes of birds in flight. The sculpture is powder coated with a luminescent blue that reflects light to various effects, and at sunlit daytime hours, casts linear shadows onto the surrounding retaining walls." This bookwork commemorates "Into Flight" created by Joyce Cutler-Shaw. |
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Shadows: The Movie Stills 15 x 5" closed; extends to 15 x 61"; 12 unnumbered pages. Digital prints on museum board. Fan fold structure. Black paper-covered boards. Housed in black paper covered letterfold box with bone and leather closure. Joyce Cutler-Shaw: "The skeleton and its shadows, the most durable and ephemeral traces of the human body, evoke the hidden and mysterious self. The skeleton is our primary human structure, our armature. Human evolution is written in the fossil traces of that skeletal structure. [I have] an extensive series of skeleton drawings, enlarged mylar wall works and dimensional wall collages. … [I approach] the body as a matrix of the human condition and the study of its territory as a geography." This book comes from Shadows Movie, 2007 — what the artist calls a "drawing movie" from The Skeleton and Shadow drawing series. The movie (3 minute DVD on loop) can be seen at http://joycecutlershaw.com/featured/f_5.php. This work is an offshoot of Anatomy Lesson: Unveiling the Fasciculus Medicinae by Johannes de Ketham (Robin Price, Printer and Publisher, 2004) |
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The Cage of Wild Branches 7.25 x 7.25" closed; 10.25 x 7.25" open slide-out book. Cutler-Shaw was commissioned by California Pacific Homes, a division of the Irvine Company, to create a gateway sculpture for Stonecrest Village, a major housing development in San Diego, California. She proposed this work as a conversation between the unpredictable landscape of nature - of wild birds and grasses - and the built environment. The sculpture of hand-forged steel is in two parts on facing street corners. Each is an open half seventeen feet high by eighteen feet wide at the outer edge, by thirteen feet deep of a whole circular cage. Seen from certain angles, there is the illusion that each is a fully closed circular form rather than half of a divided whole. An angle of metal loops and coils, as vines, wind about the sides and rounded tops, where the silhouettes of five birds in flight are toward the opposite corner. Cutler-Shaw created this slide-out artist book to commemorate this public art sculpture.$100 (Last two copies, Artist's Proofs) |
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| Episodes of the City bookworks | |
Memory Pictures: New York 5.25 x 3" closed, extends to 36.75"; 7 pages. Accordion fold. Black-and-white illustrations. Black paper covered boards cloth. Signed & numbered by the artist. Presumably from the artist's sketchbook, drawings of New York City sites and monuments form a mask for a long-haired anonymous figure (face only), or perhaps more accurately provide a window onto and record of what the artist sees. |
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The Poet's House is My House 9.75 x 6.75" closed; 8 pages. Accordion book. Black-and-white illustrations. Signed & numbered by the artist. Black paper-covered boards. A series of black-and-white drawings of the Edgar Alan Poe Cottage in New York City. Joyce Cutler-Shaw, interview with Margaret Lovejoy: "Lola (my mother) worked toward going into business for herself by managing stores, and which she did, with a small shop in the Bronx when I was thirteen. We had an apartment of our own for the first time at 271 East Kingsbridge Road, across from Poe Park and Poe Cottage. I would pretend that the poet’s house was my house. Poets would become prominent in my life at that time. I went to Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School. We learned her poetry by heart, and that of other women poets such as Emily Dickinson...." |
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Village Life 9.75 x 6.75" closed; 12 pages. Accordion book. Black-and-white illustrations. Signed & numbered by the artist. Black paper covered boards. A series of black-and-white drawings of Greenwich Village with handwritten journal-like notes, both made by the artist in 2007, the time of her exhibition “Episodes of The City: New York as a Source Book." Joyce Cutler-Shaw, interview by Margot Lovejoy: "I have no idea what my life would have been like if I had stayed in New York. I am tied to the city in my imagination. It is the city as imaginary. However, I always felt like an outsider, that I did not quite belong. New York is a good place to feel like that. You can be solitary with company. Just being on the street is to be in communication. The phrase that I use in my work I realize now has been an expression of that feeling of displacement-the artist is a migratory worker, home is a portable loft. I felt about New York — which has a tangible energy that energizes me — that anything is possible, but with its fierce competitiveness, perhaps nothing is possible. However, an art life here is always possible, because in New York art is taken seriously, and the art audience in itself is diverse." |
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| Work resulting from the commission from the City of San Diego Library Department and The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and culture in 2002 for the Mission Valley Branch Library. | |
The Sycamore Leaf Canopy 7 x 5.4" closed; 10.75 x 4.5" open. Panoramic slide-out box. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. Signed by the artist. The City of San Diego Library Department and The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and culture commissioned The Sycamore Leaf Canopy in 2002 for the Mission Valley Branch Library. The theme of the library branch is the San Diego River, a prime natural resource of San Diego's Mission Valley. The riverbanks are a habitat of native California sycamore trees which inspired this design by Cutler-Shaw. The installation consists of eight columns, visual metaphors for the sheltering bower of a tree. The columns are 16 by 16 foot sections of quarter inch plasma cut steel. Each section is set within one of the eight structural columns, which support the arched library ceiling. Cutler-Shaw produced this black and white slide-out artist book to commemorate the installation. |
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The Railing of the Wild River Grasses Mixed media fanfold book with bark cover. The City of San Diego Library Department and The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture commissioned three art installations for the Mission Valley Branch Library in 2002. The theme of the library branch is the San Diego River, a prime natural resource of San Diego's Mission Valley. The riverbanks are a habitat of native California wild river grasses which inspired this design by Cutler-Shaw. The installation of the Railing of Wild River Grasses consists of thirty-nine etched glass panels, each from a unique drawing, 42 inches high, and from 22 to 53 inches wide, of quarter inch tempered glass, for the balcony and staircase. Cutler-Shaw produced this fan-fold book to commemorate the installation. |
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Elegy for the Natural World 12 x 23 cm. Printed in black on translucent white vellum. Bound in handmade paper to resemble bark. An accordion fold artist's book that duplicates Joyce Cutler Shaw's 65' by 3'' public installation of large scale drawings of sycamore branches, cascading leaves and silhouettes of wild birds. The book was conceived as a result of the installation and as a homage to our disappearing natural landscape.
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| Bookworks resulting / relating to her Alphabet of Bones series | |
Lost and Found in the Garden of Wild Birds and Grasses 19 x 19 cm folded accordion star fold in black and white. Slipped in envelope. A twelve part continuously unfolding paper narrative. Shaped like a fortune teller, the book's four corners open out to reveal successive layers of the artist's calligraphies - the first being her alphabet of bones, based on the hollow bones of birds, the next an alphabet based on the silhouettes of wild birds. The most interior layers of the book show photographs of an environment of grasses and branches, and at the final opening, the book becomes a single sheet on the back of which is printed an explanatory text and the translation of a poem in The Alphabet of Bones. |
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Three Cages Handprinted in a triangular accordion format which measures 4 1/8 x 8 1/4" when closed and opens to a full length of 64". Text is typeset in the Alphabet of Bones, an original calligraphic font based on the hollow bones of birds. Printed on 100% cotton fabric Clearprint with cotton fiber museum board covers. The imprinted wrapper is self-folding. Book folded into triangular shapes with text facing each other. Signed and numbered. The winning entry in a juried competition of small book concepts for publication by the Center for Book Arts in New York.
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Page last update: 01.12.10
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