David Bunn: Angles gallery

David Bunn acquired the roughly seven million cards that made up the beholds Angeles Central Library's now-obsolete card catalogue in 1990 In 1993 he installed 9506 of them in the library's sum of two units new elevator shafts in similar a way that they could be viewed [i]or[/i] part of to the other the passenger-car windows. Sometimes an artist's source material make go rounds out to be more compelling than his or her work, and knowing by what means many of those cards remained made me worry that for Bunn this point in dispute might be right around the corner. on the contrary though a lesser artist might have turn rounded into a one-trick pony engaged in an unengaging session of "And there's more where that came from," Bunn has prov that his windfall was a real opportunity. He's now the master and connoisseur of a strange and special domain and has produc from it consistently thought-provoking Concrete(-esque) poesy performances, readings, videos, and installations.

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For a material substance of work made in 2004 the greatest in quantity visually bold incarnation of what's been until now a rather astute art, Bunn employed an ultra-high-resolution scanner to create unique iris-print blowup of the marks and changes chance has worked on his collection. Curious play upon wordss and ironies are exhumed, and literal and literary boundaries toyed with. A bit of ink one time spilled between cards for sum of two units books on utopia yields a humanoid Rorschach strike out A soiled card for The Confessions of Aleister Crowley has what direct the eyes like a bite taken on the outside of it (though this is more likely the accrue of rough handling). An apparently oft-consult card for a volume called Secret Societies and Subversive moves bears an enigmatic stain. A pair of cards from a section upon vampires reveal two suspicious tiny r marks. And during the artist's search for buried treasure, he smooth unearthed the work of another artist, someone through the name of Rosalea, who in 1979 hid postage stamp-size prints depicting suggestively coupl valentine hearts among the cards in the art section.

Of course, there is more where all this came from. This fact provides Bunn with endles potential for fresh wonder yet also presents the ever-present risk that the work could slip into laziness and redundancy. on the other hand his recent offering shows by what mode he has once again managed a turn back to his source and a reinvention of his throw out emerging as a conceptualist with a impressible spot for the hands-on and as an appropriationist playing an ongoing, multifaceted game of exquisite corpse in which the authors of the volumes the authors of the cards, and the authors of their anonymous annotations and alterations could at no time have known they'd participate.

--CM

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