Secular Response by Ingrid Calame
Secular Response by Ingrid Calame
Oblong quarto. 42pp. First edition. Bolt bound with three stainless steel bolt closures to spine. Some creasing and tearing to the guard protecting the card wraps from the bolts, cosmetic only. A very good, clean, strong copy. Signed and numbered (#27) by Ingrid Calame to the lower corner of the recto of the rear cover, dated 2002. Also present is a note from Calame (written on a piece of the same card used for the binding: “Dear Lynn, Hullo, How are you? I’ve enclosed ‘Report on Secular Response I’ which documents the large work of the last 2 years. Secular Response 2 based on the Trading Floor of the NYSE is in the works. Hope you enjoy #1! Best Wishes Ingrid C.” Dated 14th January 2002. A fascinated and inventively presented catalogue of Calame’s attempts to explore the artistic question “How do we understand a whole from its parts?” the end result of which was exhibited at Ardsley United Methodist Church, in Ardsley NY. The whole is rather an exercise in negative space where images are reconstructed with “tracing stains from the street which we trace as accurately as possible with pencil on trace mylar” the ‘stains’ are then reproduced in large format in a gallery space to recreate ‘constellations.’ The end result rather fascinatingly is “a painting which I cannot preconceive of as a whole, which is too ‘big’ for me to see.” The representation of the process in book form utilises transparent acetate pages which overlay full page colour photographs of the gallery space. Clearly a limited, workshop produced piece, exploring some compelling artistic concepts in a manner which makes some interesting contributions to art book construction. Scarce.