Archives
Project reflects spirit of threatened library
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
When the James Mead Library was selected as one of several Buffalo branch libraries to be closed, the Lovejoy neighborhood and Council member Richard Fontana took steps to keep Mead open as a community resource.
They succeeded.
Today, the library, located at 126 Ludington, St., is a volunteer-run center that continues to lend books, hosts weekly meetings of such groups as the Homemaker's Society, offers free World Wide Web access to the public, and this month, is the subject of an art exhibition.
"Now In Circulation: Site-Specific Art at Mead" is a special presentation of performances, video, sculpture, writing and interactive art by UB artists that explores aspects of the library and the role it has played and continues to play in its community.
It opened yesterday with a public reception and will be accessible to visitors from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and tomorrow, and from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday. It is free and open to the public.
The work to be shown was produced by students in the UB course "Site-Specific Installation" taught by Caroline Koebel, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study, College of Arts and Sciences.
"What the projects in the Mead exhibition have in common," Koebel says, "is that they were directly inspired by the unique qualities of this library, which is what makes them examples of 'site-specific' practice."
"Participating artists are UB students from New York State, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Nepal, India, Korea, Turkey and Canada," she says, "and, like their places of origin, the projects encompass a wide variety of tools, concepts and methods. The industrious and collective spirit demonstrated by the students is very much in keeping with Mead Library's roots."
This project continues the tradition of Koebel's course, which is dedicated to conceptualizing and realizing artworks made for specific sites in the City of Buffalo. Previous exhibitions of work from the course have been held on the 25th floor of Buffalo City Hall and at the Asbury-Delaware Church, now the home of Righteous Babe Records and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
"Now In Circulation" is sponsored by the Department of Media Study, the Dean's Office in the School of Architecture and Planning, the Graduate Student Association, Lovejoy District Council member Richard Fontana, the Lovejoy neighborhood and an anonymous donor.
For more information, contact Koebel at 863-0440 or cgkoebel@buffalo.edu, or go to the "Now in Circulation" Web site at http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/nowincirculation.
The 13 works of art now on view as part of "Now in Circulation" are:
Poigner, in which Penelope Stewart cast beautiful beeswax doorknobs from the Mead's actual doorknobs, then installed them in the place of the metal knobs for the length of the exhibition. During that period, they will be warmed and shaped by the hands of the library's constituents and thus become an archive of the local community.
Exploration of Time and Space by Aaron Smith takes viewers through a visual tour of the library's physical space while at the same time giving them a historic tour of the time period in which it was constructed.
Basement Flights by Sujan Shrestha honors those who worked to save the library site by illustrating their daily activities—activities that would not be possible in the event of closure.
Operation Mead by David Ruperti is a public-relations campaign that solicits ideas and opinions from the community regarding the future of the Mead library.
Time and Other Systems by Chris Barr and Véronique Coté is a performance and book project based on a children's book titled "Time" that the artists found in the library's children's section. The book, in an attempt to teach something as innocent as telling time, maps out a child's day hour by hour. Barr and Coté lived in Big Orbit Gallery for five days and followed the activities described in the book (get up at 7 a.m., eat oatmeal at 8 a.m., etc., to the bedtime). They note that the book encourages children to be part of a system of organized time, related to and supportive of capitalist labor practice. In its rigid repetitiveness, they say they found the experience somewhat alienating.
Sema at Mead, an installation by Ayse Tasken, was inspired by Sufi mysticism. It juxtaposes institutions of knowledge and spirituality—the Mead Library and the Baptist Church—to symbolically demonstrate the importance of communal life and community space, and to highlight Lovejoy community's efforts to keep its library open.
Mead Unplugged, Contents Under Pressure! by Gautam Malik is a performance installation about the shift in information-gathering sites from the physical space of the library to the virtual site of the Internet. It looks at the many questions raised about the seizure of yet another socially interactive space.
(book)Mark by Aimee Buyea is an interactive search for the remnants of childhood memories and the meanings of localized space. It was inspired by the artist's experiences as a child at the Mead Library.
Time Capsule by Bob Moynihan uses a Web site, posters and word of mouth to ask Mead Library users to share their memories and predictions for inclusion in a "democratized" time capsule. Items can be emailed to Moynihan at Moynihan@buffalo.edu or delivered to the library. Moynihan also hopes to involve students from nearby St. Agnes School in writing material to be included. The capsule will be sealed and preserved for future generations following the exhibit.
Public Restrooms by Mili Pradhan disrupts notions of "girl-pink" and "boy-blue" to raises issues about gender, sexuality and queer identity in both private and public spheres.
Shady Poetree by Seon Hyoung Kim involves language, poetry and the spawning of knowledge and educational structure from a woman's perspective.
Map Room also by Stewart is an intervention in a small forgotten space that explores the accidental or unintentional records of the site.
The Abstract Index by Chris Ernst extrapolates from the roles of classification and indexing within the library system. It utilizes multiple meanings of the word "abstract" to provide an alternative catalog of the entire "Now In Circulation" exhibition. The result is an eclectic index that classifies the individual art works and separate original art abstracts of each piece. In this way it provides an alternative tool for reflection and discourse on the nature of classification, interpretation, art and the site-specific show itself.