Nina Katchadourian has found a poetic way of sorting library books, arranging the spines as lines of verse, short and sharp and removed from the content within.
The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library’s holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.
Nina is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco.
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