Ordinal Solid installed at Cecille R. Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St. Louis, MO, 2018.

Ordinal Solid is the third exhibition of a body of work based on the library as a curated, collaborative and performed space. Previous iterations were exhibited as Babel Unbound in Cork, Ireland and Babel Revisited at Space Gallery in Portland, ME. Photographs, large-scale digital prints, and vinyl text paginate the gallery walls referencing over-sized pages from a book. Pieces of text and abstracted, symbolic images loosely connect threads of research and meandering thoughts on the library. A compass-like instrument, an archive of sorts, firmly positions itself central in the space. Objects, such as magenta finger-cots, a chunk of magnesium carbonate, 3D printed totems and a meteor fragment tell a story rich in materiality and lost in contemplation.

Performing the Book, a single-channel video, explores both the tactile handling of loose pages, while bound, and references the magenta-fingered scanning process at Google Books Library Project. With the book in motion, relationships emerge and dissipate within seconds, making the magic of browsing visible and highly aesthetic.