Suvan Geer stands next to her piece "Loose Ends."
From hair curled inside a book to notes on a soon-to-come bridge, page-centric pieces from more than 20 artists are on display through Jan. 27 at the Art Center’s Williamson Gallery.
The aptly titled “Pages” exhibition, which was recently featured in the Los Angeles Times, was 18 months in the making and features on array of objects, books and papers honoring the page’s seminal role in crafting culture and knowledge.
“You can look at a book as if it’s a body,” said artist Suvan Geer of her 1999 piece “Loose Ends,” which pairs an open book with human hair. “When someone dies, their hair and nails keep growing … When you close [a book], where does it go? How do you know when something’s alive?”
Faculty member Simon Johnston took a seemingly obsessive-compulsive approach with “Investigation.” The 1997 piece is comprised of 256 individually framed pages from “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influential book about the shortcomings of language, with all of the words omitted except “this.”
“Words act as signals that take you to a thing, except ‘this.’ It’s a black hole of language,” he said.