Julie Chen

Julie Chen is the “borrower” for this entry because of one of those serendipitous moments in which libraries abound. VCU has a wonderful special collections department, and one rainy day I wandered in and met Gay Acompañado, Archival Assistant for Arts.  I told her I was interested in finding a bookwork artist and really had no idea of the scope of the collection. Could she help? Before I knew it, I was in a tidy little research space, calm and quite, with a book truck full of wonders. That is how I found Julie Chen, an artist whose work unfolds on multiple planes and reveals deeper and more complex structures the longer it is read.

I came to bookworks via my final term project for MATX 602, History of Media, Art, and Text.  As a librarian I have long been interested in the preservation of texts, which means I am interested in their construction as well. My interest was also triggered by reading “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” by N. Katherine Hayles in Texts and Textuality (MATX 601).

[Access to paper removed 4/2010. Contact me if you wish to read the paper.]
(PDF file, 136 KB)