Summer reading has always been my strong suit. While my elementary school classmates spent their summers blasting grand slams in camp-wide kickball and cramming to churn out book reports the day before school started, I made sure to balance my dodgeball with my Roald Dahl. And though those days are behind me, I was still stoked to stop by The Hole's newest exhibition, Summer Reading, to get back on my Lisa Simpson game. The bookworm group show is the rebellious, hypothetical love child of the Guggenheim and the Reading Rainbow. Summer Reading's paintings, sculptures, illustrations, and photos are bookended with actual books, intentionally blurring the line between piece and paperback to interactively question the relationship between media and masterpiece.
Although the exhibition is largely a celebration of brightly colored covers and pages dog-eared with love, death is a tangible motif throughout. From Harland Miller’s reappropriated Penguin Classic painting that asks "Death: What’s In It For Me?" to Sean Landers' library of adjusted morbid titles, Summer Reading grapples with print's seemingly ominous future. But ultimately, the exhibition is less an elegy and more of an all-encompassing exploration of books and the written word.
In addition to featuring pieces from OC pals Andrew Kuo, Leo Fitzpatrick, and Miranda July among many talented others, Kathy Grayson has lovingly lent a portion of her personal art book and zine collection to the exhibition, inviting Hole visitors to cozy up and crack some spines. I got all Encyclopedia Brown with Grayson, asking some hard-hitting questions.
Emily Manning: If The Hole was crumbling in a burning inferno and you could only save one of your books, what would it be?
Kathy Grayson: My box of Dash Snow zines! Except once, I had a zine of Dash's on my coffee table when I lived on Ludlow years ago, and I woke up in the middle of the night to smoke. The zine had SPONTENOUSLY COMBUSTED and my whole coffee table was on fire! Dash loved that story, he liked to think his zines were full of evil and were "incendiary" I guess, haha.
Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey? Be honest.
I have NOT, but I know for a fact that prominent Danish art advisor and curator Nicolai Frahm has :)
If you could eat dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and what would you eat?
Gargantua and we would eat peasants who fell into our salad.
I think eBooks are _____:
eBooks, what is that? The only material benefit of the digitization of texts is that now, when kids have a high school paper on "the color green in The Great Gatsby" they can just Apple+F and type GREEN, and be done with it, whereas I had to read the paper book with a green highlighter five times over. What a pain.
Favorite book from childhood?
I have it here on my desk as I didn't want it lost in the library. It's called Norman the Doorman; this mouse is the "mouse doorman" at a museum, and he makes a sculpture out of a mousetrap and secertly enters it into the museum's human art competition––and wins! So they give him cheese.
What's the best use for a book other than reading it? Battle weapon? Coaster?
Books make great art installations :) . And bug smooshers. Oh and Ryan McGinley texted me saying he'd walked into Dash's house once and there was a stack of phonebooks in the kitchen, and when he asked why that was, Dash said he needed them to have sex with this tall girl. Hahahaha, sorry I guess a lot of these responses happen to be Dash-themed, he was indeed the funnest.
Although the exhibition is largely a celebration of brightly colored covers and pages dog-eared with love, death is a tangible motif throughout. From Harland Miller’s reappropriated Penguin Classic painting that asks "Death: What’s In It For Me?" to Sean Landers' library of adjusted morbid titles, Summer Reading grapples with print's seemingly ominous future. But ultimately, the exhibition is less an elegy and more of an all-encompassing exploration of books and the written word.
In addition to featuring pieces from OC pals Andrew Kuo, Leo Fitzpatrick, and Miranda July among many talented others, Kathy Grayson has lovingly lent a portion of her personal art book and zine collection to the exhibition, inviting Hole visitors to cozy up and crack some spines. I got all Encyclopedia Brown with Grayson, asking some hard-hitting questions.
Emily Manning: If The Hole was crumbling in a burning inferno and you could only save one of your books, what would it be?
Kathy Grayson: My box of Dash Snow zines! Except once, I had a zine of Dash's on my coffee table when I lived on Ludlow years ago, and I woke up in the middle of the night to smoke. The zine had SPONTENOUSLY COMBUSTED and my whole coffee table was on fire! Dash loved that story, he liked to think his zines were full of evil and were "incendiary" I guess, haha.
Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey? Be honest.
I have NOT, but I know for a fact that prominent Danish art advisor and curator Nicolai Frahm has :)
If you could eat dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and what would you eat?
Gargantua and we would eat peasants who fell into our salad.
I think eBooks are _____:
eBooks, what is that? The only material benefit of the digitization of texts is that now, when kids have a high school paper on "the color green in The Great Gatsby" they can just Apple+F and type GREEN, and be done with it, whereas I had to read the paper book with a green highlighter five times over. What a pain.
Favorite book from childhood?
I have it here on my desk as I didn't want it lost in the library. It's called Norman the Doorman; this mouse is the "mouse doorman" at a museum, and he makes a sculpture out of a mousetrap and secertly enters it into the museum's human art competition––and wins! So they give him cheese.
What's the best use for a book other than reading it? Battle weapon? Coaster?
Books make great art installations :) . And bug smooshers. Oh and Ryan McGinley texted me saying he'd walked into Dash's house once and there was a stack of phonebooks in the kitchen, and when he asked why that was, Dash said he needed them to have sex with this tall girl. Hahahaha, sorry I guess a lot of these responses happen to be Dash-themed, he was indeed the funnest.