THE RAPPORT OF BEAUTY: BOOK DESIGN BY KEN BOTNICK | COLLAGE BY JOHN FRASER
May 16 – July 25, 2021
Gallery Sponsors: Hunt and Donna Bonan
Exhibit Sponsors: Designs by Linda | Sidwell Friends B&B
Members’ Preview Reception: Saturday, May 15 | 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Preview Reception Admission: $5.00 | Cedarhurst Members – free
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT:
The Rapport of Beauty exhibition unpacks the aesthetic dimensions and social relationships informing the beauty of the artist book and the art of collage. We will explore those relationships with Massachusetts book designer Ken Botnick and Illinois collage artist John Fraser.
In this exhibition, we are comparing the book “parts” in John Fraser’s beautiful collages with Ken Botnick’s beautifully “complete” artist books. What does comparing a repurposed but torn apart book to a whole book tell us? What does a “whole” artist book tell us about the “dismembered” components of a book? The exhibition explores these questions and more.
Rapport is the relationship we have with beauty. As Diderot said, rapport is an understanding, it is knowledge.
Finally, both collage and printed books offer resistance to digital cooptation. The digital washes away the original and signifying materialities. Both collage and the artist book require a pace of reading that slows the now-normal hectic pace and in doing so retunes the senses. Reading becomes sensual again.
Reading works of art and books involves a careful inspection of how the literal, the symbolic, and their aesthetics operate.
