"Tittlebat Titmouse" from the series "Once Upon a Time in Delaware/In Quest of the Perfect Book," 2012 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing)

Nina Katchadourian

"Tittlebat Titmouse" from the series "Once Upon a Time in Delaware/In Quest of the Perfect Book," 2012 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2012

C-print
13 1/2 x 16 inches framed
Retail Value $3,550 / Starting Bid $1,450
Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery
SOLD

In 2010, the Delaware Art Museum invited Nina Katchadourian to work with the books in the M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings. The collection comprises over 2,000 books, acquired on the basis of their cover design. It was an opportunity for her to take a close look at the culture and history of the United States between approximately 1870 and 1920. Fiction was dominated by themes of travel, romance, science, the automobile, rural American farm life, and the West. The Old World also hovers around the popular imagination in the many books about knights, kings, and European history. A visual and linguistic shift takes place between prim Victorian bindings and the racy dust jackets of books thirty years later. Spectacularly gilded covers reflect the wealth of the United States during certain periods, and austere designs take over during times of belt-tightening. Katchadourian noticed a curious surge in late 19th-century fiction romanticizing Native Americans and despaired when she realized how this coincided with their violent displacement and decimation.

Katchadourian came to know the books in this collection intimately through several visits to the museum but also by working remotely with their online database of the book covers. She printed out about 700 small-scale copies and spent months arranging them in her studio before coming to the museum to finalize the groupings. This sorting yielded more book clusters than any other, but it was an agonizing last day, and it felt impossible to stop when there was always one more book that begged for inclusion. For the first time she worked with the book covers up, in part because the titles didn't always appear on the spines, but also because the covers were rich with information and so beautiful that she couldn't imagine otherwise.

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included in the 2015 Venice Biennale as part of the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, MoMA, and MoMA PS1. Katchadourian has been widely published nationally and internationally, including a monograph, "Sorted Books," published by Chronicle Books in 2013. In March 2017, a traveling survey exhibition of her work titled "Curiouser" opened at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, with an accompanying monograph. Following the Blanton, "Curiouser" opened at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in September 2017.*