ALTERED BOOKS - Donation Piece

Double Bind, April 2021 (front right view)

I created this as a donation for the Altered Book show/fundraiser at MOCA which runs from April 24 through May 23, 2021. This piece came together despite my best efforts to over-think and complicate it. The pink is lighter and brighter than it appears in the photo. It was designed to hang on the wall, like a painting. Getting good images of this piece was challenging, since it was finished mere moments before being delivered. Procrastination seems to be the name of the game for me these days. Things are ready when they are ready, and no sooner.

This evoked different ideas, thoughts, insights and feelings as it was pulling itself together, never really settling on any one, but rather incorporating them all, in a multi-layered or point of reference sort of way. A friend saw it and asked me about metaphors, meanings and what it meant. I hadn't really thought about how to describe it, since I sort of felt it. It was interesting for me put it into  into words to see what I thought.

Double Bind, April 2021 (front left view)

Q. So is the book a metaphor for the ‘heart contained’?
"Often times, I see an image (of a piece) in my mind and decode it later. The book was that way. I saw it in pieces, which came together at the end. In this case less is so much more. I am not sure about the metaphor. Maybe the book is habitual patterning or the binds of societal norms and the hand extended is an invitation to the unknown. I think it all comes down to curiosity and courage, the quest for self-knowledge and the risks that it implies. One can choose to remain blissfully unaware of choice and plod on programmed by convention. Or, one can cower in fear and hide behind rhetoric when faced with new and unexpected situations. Or, one can choose to look deeper, to bite into life, to savor the unexpected.

How would you describe the taste of an apple to someone who has never had one? Wouldn't it be better just to hand it to them to taste for themselves? Is the apple sweet? Is it sour? Is it crisp? Whatever the experience is... that is reality, the totality of life in action."

Q. What do you hope the viewer experiences?
At first, that feeling that you get in your head, when your mind sort of flips and thought is suspended for a moment. That brief pause that feels the knowing but can't quite pin it down.

Then, whatever comes to mind. I see so many things in it, from the arising feminine, to courage and curiosity, to theory over experience, to the contrast of the academic knowledge of life to the actual experience of life, to the willingness to move beyond the rigidity of belief. Ask me again tomorrow and I will see something different. I think it is like a Rorshack test.

This piece is also somehow invisibly tethered to this thought/quote... "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue." - Rainer Maria Rilke

Ultimately, I doesn't matters what I see in a piece or what I intended. What matters is the observer's experience. How it makes them feel and what it says to them when viewed thorough the unique lens of their existence.

The links below contain more information about the show, in case you want to see the other pieces in the show and/or bid on them.

Info to visit in person:
https://marinmoca.org/exhibitions/event/131/
Info to visit & bid online:
https://www.bidsquare.com/.../rayne-madison-untitled-220243