Dislocations
by GAP
DISLOCATIONS : Global Art Project Artists’ Books thru September 12th, 2022 at: Lafayette Public Library 3287 Mount Diablo Ct, Lafayette, CA 94549, United States STATEMENT: The Artists’ Book is a portable gallery; an intimate exhibition of personal expression shared or secreted; collaborative; caters slightly to the instinct of destroying to create; an alteration of what has come before resulting in something unique such as graffiti declares “I am here”, “I exist”, “Look what we can do together”. These gestures forward the prospect of the democratization of the art process, a key element of our group aesthetic. DISLOCATIONS is the name that umbrellas all GAP Artists’ Books created individually or collectively. The original design and contextual purpose of many of these books has been diverted and these alterations (dislocations) breathe new life into the materials. GLOBAL ART PROJECT as an international collaborative collective of 70+ members working in 17 countries creates Artists’ Books as a means of group communication, directed interaction and as a prompt for personal practice used in exercises with the books or fragments (frags) delivered through the postal system, in residencies around the world, workshops or when local GAP members gather informally and pass around a discarded book, a crumbling artifact to salvage giving new visual life to a sketchbook, phone book, road map or blank sheets of paper which may be bound together more formally. These mixed media artifacts have been exhibited in numerous galleries and travel with us during residencies in Italy, USA, Mexico and Africa with scheduled exhibitions in Lier, Belgium in 2023 and 2024.
