Whitebox: Street artist preaches power of reading | OregonLive.com

It's been a rough few years for the printed word. With books going paperless via e-readers and our sound bite media nudging our attention spans ever closer to extinction, printed matter and the culture of reading have seemed an increasingly endangered species. This imminent threat to literacy and a tradition of introspective enrichment has fuelled the work of the Washington state street artist who goes by the enigmatic handle "The Reader."

In the past decade, he has been a fervent evangelist of books and reading, traveling the country and spreading his message in galleries and, as a graffitist, in the public sphere. Following his recent exhibition at Ditch Projectsin Springfield, titled "Read Up in a Down Economy,"The Reader brings his multimedia work to Portland, transforming the U of O White Box with "Affective Duplication."

Thomas work review The Reader: "Affective Duplication"

Where: The White Box at the University of Oregon in Portland, 24 N.W. First Ave., 503-412-3689

Hours: noon-6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Ends: Jan. 26

Admission: free

Nearly every component of the show is anchored in the visual language of books and reading.

Various suites of collaged posters, which replicate the bold graphic style of propaganda, repeat images of opened books and are pieced together from printed ephemera, such as receipts, grocery lists and hand-written notes. Nearby, a large-scale sculpture is fabricated from a dozen newspaper dispensers. Painted in various cheery colors, stippled with gunshots, and stenciled and stacked like a child's wooden letter blocks, the repurposed racks spell out their message in the plainest of terms: "RE-READ BOOKS."

In the White Box's video gallery, a stop-motion animation is simultaneously projected onto three walls from another modified newspaper box. As stickers and scraps of paper pile up in the video, snippets of text spring to life, imploring viewers to read.

Most impressively, The Reader has installed tall panels of rusted corrugated steel, imbuing the space with an industrial quality and fashioning a dark and claustrophobic passage between the front and rear galleries.

Walking through the makeshift tunnel, viewers discover subtly glowing lights that peek out through grates and bullet holes in the steel, revealing hidden spaces and additional work only visible through those peepholes.

While The Reader's overarching message is conveyed so directly that it's impossible to miss, his work draws its real power from the suggestion that existing in the world is itself a kind of reading.

In one series of posters, an upside-down image of the United States is paired with the phrases "coast to coast" and "cover to cover" (which, in another piece in the series, morphs into "over and over"). Here, his travels across the country are cast as a repeated interaction with a text -- one that is so rich it demands to be reread endlessly. In that sense, his literary appeals become challenges to remain wide-eyed and engaged -- and to always read between the lines.

-- John Motley

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2012/12/whitebox_street_artist_preache.html

Sasha McHale Boy Meets World chicago bears elizabeth taylor casey anthony chris brown cam newton