Simryn Gill's Pearls at the Sackler Gallery
Though it opened in fall last year, Perspectives, a mini-retrospective of Simryn Gill's work at the Sackler Gallery, complements the spring Craft Invitational at the Renwick. One piece in the Sackler show represents another way that artists commonly approach craft: they reconsider design and craft objects using unfamiliar materials.
In this series, called Pearls, Gill has asked friends to contribute books that have special significance to them; she returns these books to them as necklaces, with "beads" constructed from pages of text. The artist didn't intend to exhibit these pieces until, on a recent visit, she saw the Sackler Gallery's collection of ancient Asian beads made in jade, gold, and glass. An ongoing project, Pearls plays on the fetishistic value that books hold for readers. (LibraryThing illustrates the pride that readers take in their personal book collections: it's a cataloging and social-networking site organized around the books on users' shelves.) Gill's piece translates, in a sense, one craft into another: bookbinding, typography, and graphic design are lost as the books are rendered into objects with a different purpose or use.
Michael O'Sullivan reviewed the show for the Washington Post here.
