While I’ll be otherwise engaged this coming weekend in an annual cultural tradition that my friends and I like to call Boozefest, that shouldn’t stop those of you within reach of Vancouver from checking out the first installation of the Portable Library Project at the Regional Assembly of Text. Curated by Tara Bursey, this project pulls together eighteen artists (including yours truly) from across Canada and as far afield as Seoul with their individual responses to a mail-based proposition.

The premise of the Portable Library Project was fairly simple: each artist received an empty cigar box in the mail (by sometimes circuitous means, mine eventually came in from Whitehorse of all places) and basic instructions to create seven ‘books’ in seven days. The definition of ‘book’ was to be treated loosely, with the sole constraint being that all seven books must be able to fit within the cigar box (itself about the size of a hardcover book), which in turn serves as a self-contained library for the finished books, complete with table of contents.

For my part, I found the project a fantastic opportunity to play outside my comfort zone by tackling my love of narrative objects without resorting to drawing. Interpreting Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest as seven tactile (and in some cases, olfactory) vignettes was a challenge, but one that reinforced many valuable lessons about problem-solving as an art-making strategy. I learned that packing twenty-nine burnt matchsticks (one for each accountable death in the book) back into a tiny matchbox while keeping them intact is extremely delicate work, and that gin will not only dissolve ink to near-illegibility but also turn that gin a lovely shade of purple (the latter is now down in the ‘explore further’ category).

The real interest in the project, however, is seeing the diversity of book-interpretations produced among all the artists, ranging from sewn crafts to theoretical-conceptual exercises. Going by the blog archive so far, both Daphne Gerou and Debbie Denelly have produced great little libraries that I look forward to seeing in person when the show makes its way closer to home. In the meantime, the launch party in Vancouver looks like a festive afternoon in the making, with barbeque to follow - I’ll probably also be cooking meat over fire at around the same time, even, but I understand a trampoline will also be involved somehow.

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