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Betsy Davids was among the 70s pioneers of artists’ books as a medium for
contemporary art. She is a longtime teacher of book arts and writing at
California College of the Arts.
Artist Statement “Unfoldings” I traveled to Denmark in June 2004 not only for IASD Copenhagen but also for a first visit to ancestral sites. The sequential openings of this unfolding cube embody that experience of connections and disconnections. At its center is a text from the visit’s most significant dream, of a Danish man mysteriously folded in half and cut in two, and of me trying to match the pieces of him in my hands. I understood the dream as an image of emigration and diaspora. Two faces of the cube picture the birthplace of my emigrant great-great grandfather, once as photographed in the 70s by an earlier family pilgrim and once as photographed by me in 2004, when I found one of the two traditional farm buildings intact and the other quite recently demolished, leaving only a single wall with rose-flowered wallpaper. The wall can be seen on another face of the cube, and one cube opening reveals a detail of its window. Other faces show an aerial view of Denmark from my arriving flight and a falling male figure cut in stone, from a Copenhagen monument. In the cube structure, every image is cut and folded, everything falls into pieces and comes back together, disappears and reappears. | ||||||
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