Beyond the Rectangle: An Artist Book as Vessels

By Marilyn Valiente Beyond the rectangle: an artist book as vessels Marilyn Valiente Curated by: Shirley Moreira For centuries, the book has been one of our primary spaces for preserving, organizing, and transmitting knowledge. Its pages construct sequences, connect ideas, and allow experiences, memories, and thoughts to travel across time and reach the reader. The artist’s book emerges from this same communicative capacity while altering its codes: it no longer merely contains a work or a discourse but becomes the work itself. The page ceases to function solely as a support for text; image, material, texture, gesture, emptiness, folds, and the very structure of the book all participate in the construction of meaning. Reading, then, also becomes an act of looking, touching, navigating, and discovering. Beyond the rectangle: an artist book as vessels, an exhibition by artist Marilyn Valiente, is situated precisely within this territory of displacement. Presented in the context of the Main Library, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between two ways of understanding the book: one we recognize as a repository and transmitter of knowledge, and another that, through the visual arts…