GUTTENBERG – Sarah Nicholls is a visual artist who makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words. She often uses found language and metal type, combining image, visual narrative, and time. “Reading Time,” a solo exhibition of her works, is a reading room installed in the gallery at Guttenberg Arts that invites visitors to engage with monologues, brochures, ephemera, manifestos, scientific matter, propaganda, and alternate histories in the form of printed language. Included are a range of publications and a selection of prints which collectively revolve around the authority of the printed word. Reading Time is on view from Jan. 7 through Feb. 6 at Guttenberg Arts, 6903 Jackson St.
Artist books and artist-driven publications have risen to a new level of prominence despite the ongoing digitization of culture and communication. Books are a technology that, among other things, can respond to and depict the passing of time. Reading is a time-based activity, one that can slow down and create interior lapses in time. Your interior “reading voice” helps to both reinforce the private nature of reading, and the one-on-one connection the act creates. Handmade books in particular ask the reader to pause and contemplate the physicality of the book, the particular hands that have produced the work, and the time it took them to do so.
Nicholls, currently an artist in residence at Guttenberg Arts, has written a collection of self-help aphorisms, publishes a series of informational pamphlets, and recently completed a field guide to extinct birds. Her limited edition artist books are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. For 12 years, she ran the studio programs at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Currently she teaches letterpress at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
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