Tunnel Vision.
Pisano, Maria G.
Plainsboro, NJ: Memory Press, 2004. Artist's book, one of 25 copies, all on Rives BFK paper and Sekishu paper, each signed by the artist and numbered in the colophon. Page size: 8 x 8 inches opening to 80 inches long in the form of a tunnel book. Bound by the artist, housed in clear ocean green plexi hinged box with paper label laid in at spine to show title printed in rondel, artist, press, and date below it. Ms. Pisano has printed the poem she has written letterpress in Frutiger type. The opening gates of the book are from a drawing Ms. Pisano made from an actual gate on the NY side of the Holland Tunnel, which open to reveal a 1964 photo of the artist (then a child in Italy ) on the left and her poem on the right. The next gatefold shows a blue and white page of air ducts and early vehicles that would have passed through the Holland Tunnel. The last two gate-old pages, which follow the end of the "Tunnel," are again in blue and white and feature a vintage picture of the artist's father, an Italian bricklayer who brought his family to America. The artist tells the reader / viewer that when her father told her about the Holland Tunnel, she imagined that she would be able to to see the "colorful underwater world" surrounding the tunnel "where vintage and modern cars travel through its space accompanied by fish." Fascinated by the idea that close to 6 million tiles were used for the Holland Tunnel, she used a tile pattern to create the outer walls of the book. The colorful prints that form the tunnel are a combination of intaglio, relief, lithography, chine colle, collagraph and digital printing - a culmination of a residency at The Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College. As much an homage to the unknown workers of the Holland Tunnel as to her father, this is a wonderful book documenting an engineering feat as well as the imagination. (Item ID: 10314)
$3,000.00
