La Jolla Reading Room (with Jared Stanley), 2022
Installation at Athenaeum Music and Arts Library
“Our fond wish is to have visitors enter a space which seems static, quiet and formal, but which upon entry becomes full of sound, a cacophony of voices filling the air with sounds, ideas, emotions, and tones, creating a loud library, a place where book bound language could be returned to the status of voices, revivifying tones, timbres, accents, and emotions.” –Jared Stanley
Artist Matthew Hebert and poet Jared Stanley continue their longstanding collaboration with the interactive sound installation La Jolla Reading Room. Composed of sculptures and sound recordings, the exhibition draws inspiration from the traditions of library reading rooms, places set aside for silent reading and contemplation, as well as the form of artists’ books, especially those which include the full spectrum of sensory experience in the act of reading. The sculptures resemble a set of reading tables arranged in a maze-like pattern within the gallery, and recordings are composed of the voices of writers, artists, and book enthusiasts—a collaged chorus of readers, thinking aloud about the experience of reading and interacting with artists’ books.
Stanley and Hebert invited community members to visit the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, California, and asked them to spend about 45 minutes engaging with selected books in the library’s artists’ book collection, after which they recorded brief interviews about their experience. Selections from the interviews are included in the installation, blended with the voices of others in the community to create a constantly shifting choral work which changes each time a visitor walks through the exhibition.
