The Book of the Month is a collaboration between the Taos Center for the Arts and the Taos Book Arts Group. Each month a new work of art is on display in the Encore Gallery. Artists in the Book Arts Group experiment with a wide range of readily available materials and simple techniques to develop creative narratives. Sometimes they bear little resemblance to the codex book form that is most familiar to all of us, yet they share with all books sequence and narrative.

My book is titled “Plaza Blanca: House of Cards”. It is a piece about the White Place, or Plaza Blanca, in Abiquiu and is based on a child’s game, “A House of Cards.” I see it in relation to the White Place and the way it is always eroding and changing, how portions of the cliff fall down, rocks weather, and water carves out the arroyos. It is never the same from one season to the next.

I started with two large ink drawings done on site at Plaza Blanca. I then wrote the text of a poem entitled ‘Echo Amphitheater’ by Renee Gregorio on the back. I cut the drawings into 72 cards, ran them through a laminator and then cut slots in them. They can be assembled in an infinite number of ways. There is no right or wrong structure.

ECHO AMPHITHEATER by Renee Gregorio

Water marks spill down the rock face,

deep red on pale orange, spidery dried blood.

This theater’s a bowl of sound,

a ship of air.  The horizon’s upward: a wave-

cloud through blue, trees erupting from stone,

the earth’s boundaries raw, untenable.

 

All voice is an echo, all sound a stoney return.

Too many shouting at once ends in babble,

the obscure danger behind a siren’s wail.

Short, sharp sounds echo best, the sign says.

A leaf’s softer turning doesn’t reverberate.

Here’s a stage for word’s re-making.

An unoriginal theater giving back

piercing sounds, the brief masks of voice.

 

"House of Cards: Plaza Blanca"

Yesterday I went to Abiquiu and fished my water log of the Rio Chama out of the river. It had been soaking in the water for about three weeks. The tether had gotten snagged on some sticks and the book was totally submerged and beautifully encrusted with mud.   After going into the water and searching under the muck, I found the book and unraveled it from the sticks.  The interior of the book is pages of maps and logs of the Rio Chama.  I want hints of the content to show, but I am planning on keeping the book “bound”. Here is the book in the water, and the finished book.

"Rio Chama Water Log" soaking in the river.

The opening of the show was May 7, 2011.  It was wonderful to see so many old friends and to meet new ones.   Lots of time spent catching up and swapping ideas.

Ink and hand-carved rubber stamps on Nideggen paper, mounted on amate paper.  H. 6″  L. 48″  “Goddess Chronicles” is a book about the goddess culture and how much knowledge of it has been lost. I used a bark paper accordion to refer back to the pre-Conquest codices of Mexico, many of which were burned when the Spanish arrived. It also refers to the practice of the Aztecs, who, when they conquered another people, would burn their books and write new ones, revising history to make themselves preeminent. The images, made of hand-carved rubber stamps, are taken from many different cultures and refer to various goddesses and their attributes. The names are also of goddesses who were once well-known and venerated. The book is rubbed with red pigment, once a common practice at shrines like Catal Hayuk [Neolithic site in modern Turkey]. All the images are overlaid and sometimes erased and smudged to give a sense of time. There is an underlying progression to the images from birth through life to death to rebirth. I wanted this book to have a real sense of age and survival against all odds.”