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Opening date:
Thursday, August 23, 7 pm
The pages from these books have markings left by an anonymous reader. It is the trace of the initiative taken by the reader in the mass-produced self-help book that interests me. These are books I have bought second-hand, like How to be Loved and How to be an Assertive (not Aggressive) Woman. Some of the markings are more casual and others more urgent indications of the emotional state of the reader. These variations, e.g. scribbly pencil marginalia, circled words or one highlighted line after another, suggest variations in meaning. By copying, enlarging the marked pages, and putting them up on the gallery walls, they are transformed from a sequence of pages in a book to a form of art inquiry. Like an x-ray, they become something for examination, exposing how a mass-produced book, designed to instruct in self-improvement, is consumed by a reader.
Artist:
Cathy Busby has a broad, long-term interest in pain and, specifically, ways that emotional states are represented in popular culture. Her early training at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA, 1984) laid the groundwork for her multi-disciplinary approach to this work. She presented Self-Help Library at the New Museum of Art, New York (1994) and Where Does It Hurt? at the Banff Centre for the Arts (1996). She was a contributor and co-editor of When Pain Strikes (University of Minnesota, 1999) an anthology including work by 28 artists, pain experts and people in pain. Her Ph.D. in Communication (Concordia University, 2000) included an examination of the production of self-help literature and an analysis of victim to survivor identity. In the process, she coined the term ‘autopathography’, to describe the telling of life stories in terms of suffering.
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