Books are beautiful things, some are heavier than others. When they are thrown, they are temporary travelers, as if in flight, spacious.

The works in this exhibition include "Double Self Portrait" (2000), "Reading Machine" (2001), and an untitled series of photos of groups of books flung up into the sky (2002). The earliest work here, "Double self portrait", follows a series of prior video installations and photo works dealing with voyeurism. In this piece I decided to photograph myself in my own living room window from across the street. It seemed important not to be passive in my living space while the camera watched. At home, three facets of my life come together: artist, professor, condo dweller. I decided to perform as a misbehaving professor who flings books out her window in a fit of library maintenance. As an artist who has a book fetish, I was curious to see what certain books would look like after hitting the street violently. As a professor I sometimes feel that certain forms of knowledge can’t be gotten rid of, irrespective of changing paradigms and new histories. "Reading Machine" is a piece I made about this, in honour of the gravity of the responsibility of teaching and being an artist.

As an artist and professor now well into middle age, I am drawn to the fantasy of the reversal of gravity. My collection of books is a weighty task. In the untitled photo series from 2002 I am thinking about liberatory moments. Here are my books, suspended, in that transitional time, after the heft, and before the damage.

William Eakin’s  Ghost Month  documents the contemporary practice of an ancient Taoist tradition.   In Taiwan, the seventh month on the lunar calendar marks this "Ghost Month" when it’s believed the spirits of the nether world enter the world of the living for a month-long bacchanalia. On the 30th of the month the Gates of Hades are closed again and ritual offerings are made at the entrances to people’s homes.  These include food, incense and paper objects that resemble household merchandise such as television sets, washing machines and electronic equipment.  Eakin collects and photographs these goods and re-contextualizes them as cultural artifacts.  

Cliff Eyland writes in Blackflash, "Eakin’s photographs are an inquiry into the value of ordinary things, and by extension an inquiry into high art.  His work forces viewers to ask questions about the literal value not only of kitsch , but also of the "high art" photograph with which he venerates kitsch.  As he "doubles" an object in a high art photograph, certain assignments of value in our culture of objects are made more visible."

In and of itself Eakin’s collection of Ghost Month memorabilia has an anonymous quality.  However, immortalized in photography and exhibited in the gallery they become doubly venerable, while at the same time they maintain a mocking attitude towards our own Western habit to amass, consume and collect.  Beyond being offered to the deceased they are preserved and archived for the contemporary gallery-goer.  Subtly referencing Warhol’s silk-screen documentation of everyday objects, which are enlarged and re-evaluated through photography, Eakin likewise summons the viewer to appreciate the mundane in all its humour and complexity.