Books On Books

Margot Klass is a book artist of the northern latitudes.  A studio in Fairbanks, Alaska; another in Corea, Maine.

One of her geographically characteristic works in the “flitch book”. A “flitch” is a cross-sectioned slab of timber. Take two flitches for the front and back of a Coptic-bound book, and you have a flitch book.

 

She says that her influences are Kurt Schwitters and Japanese aesthetics. In the works she labels “altarpieces”, I see Joseph Cornell and Georgia O’Keefe as well. Paul Watson’s succinct, 2003 entry on the assemblage technique holds up Schwitters and Cornell as practitioners and makes for an interesting path into appreciating Klass’s art. 

 

 

The 2007 bulletin from the Denali National Park and Reserve, where Klass was one of several artists in residence, nicely summarizes her aesthetic:

Margo Klass is a student of aesthetic space who creatively uses light to produce sculptural boxes. She studied Northern Renaissance artists for their use of spaces receding into the distance, and she has been influenced by the interior spaces and exterior landscapes of Japanese temples. During her residence in the park she used sketching, watercolors, and photography.

In 2012, Robert Hannon echoed this in a brief notice and radio interview on the occasion of her exhibit at the Fairbanks Alaska House Gallery. In 2016, the College Book Art Association presented Klass as a “Featured CBAA Artist” and also commented on the impact of medieval art on her work. But her own article from February 2017 provides the second best path to appreciating her work.

The best path is, of course, the work itself, which is well illustrated in that article.

Further reading:

Klass, Margo. “On Home Ground: Box Constructions“, Terrain.org, 14 February 2017.