CULTURE BY EROSION

It’s with a great sense of awe that we are here to publish the work of Canadian artist Guy Laramee. The idea behind his wonderful sculptures is, somehow, familiar to the Powder Culture we promote on these pages.

“Cultures arise, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones,” says Guy in his own artist’s statement. “With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. But do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our human condition? Would this affect anything in relation to the dominance of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?”

“ So I carve landscapes out of books,” continues Laramee. “Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten into fields where nothing happens. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply is. Fog and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”