Allen Ruppersberg

Alterations
October 25 – December 1 2007

Like many of Ruppersberg’s previous works, Alterations engages the viewer as a reader of objects that are both book and art.  Sewn onto large canvasses suspended from the ceiling are pages of a found agenda book belonging to a lady’s tailor in New Jersey in 1951.  Through the banal entries of client names, fitting appointment times and type of garment alteration, the outline of a work day emerges, along with a style of dress and a period in American cultural history.  The piece can be read page by page, canvas by canvas, and yet remains emergent and mysterious, a story attempting to break through into narrative.  Likewise, thesaurus entries silk-screened onto the canvas appear in fragments, between or through the nearly transparent agenda pages. 

The exhibition features 9 hanging canvases. The original pages of the old agenda book are sewed onto three raw canvases, while the ‘knock-offs’, photocopies of the originals, are sewn onto the color-dyed canvases.  Ruppersberg thus continues his practice of setting up a dialogue between original and copy, painting and sculpture, word and image, and (for the first time) fashion and art.