Stacks

(2018 - ongoing)

Stacks begins with a familiar but largely unseen library practice: books are stripped of their original covers and rebound in durable cloth, their titles stamped onto the spine. Gathered together on the shelf, they become a field of repeated forms. Original designs, images, and promotional language disappear, leaving only titles arranged in vertical sequences. Read across and down, the spines produce unexpected relationships between words, stacking into structures of meaning that are at once accidental, deliberate, and humorous. The library becomes a landscape of compressed knowledge, where vast and disparate worlds are represented by a few lines of gold-stamped text.

The practice promises preservation. Yet within these engineered bindings, the paper continues to age. Pages yellow, adhesives fail, and the contents slowly erode. The protective shell often outlasts the text it was designed to safeguard. In Stacks, preservation appears less as an act of rescue than as a kind of deferral. The work dwells in the space between permanence and disappearance, where knowledge survives as a trace, a title, a record of its own existence. The stacked spines form a stratigraphy of knowledge: layers of titles compressed into a material record of what has been collected, valued, and carried forward through time, each one pointing toward a world of information that may or may not remain accessible.

While rooted in the material culture of libraries, Stacks ultimately reflects on cultural memory itself. It explores how knowledge is gathered, ordered, and maintained against the persistence of time, and how every system of keeping contains the possibility of loss. What remains is not permanence, but the ongoing effort to hold things together, even as they slowly come apart.