Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books, p. 135 - 136: "Keven Osborn ... used a hole drilled through the entire of his book Tropos ... as a means of unifying the complex interior visual field. Tropos is multi layered, its verbal elements making an active interplay with its visual icons, patterns, and graphic motifs. It is also a complex book, one which does not immediately reveal all aspects on first viewing. The transformations of patterns, for instance, in page to page sequences, allows them to function as back ground and then in the foreground as recognizable imagery. As the profile of a Janus face comes and goes from the outside edge of the (folded) pages - facing each other across the spine - the drilled hole functions as eye and then opening, then as arbitrary point of constant reference in a field as the pages change. In a few seque3nces a faint echo of the drilled hole gains intensity until it becomes a round, dark, spot capable of passing for a double of the actual hole only to disappear again - thus emphasizing the real hole's representational nature and its dimensionality.".

Exhibition notes:
Item 118 on Artists' Books in the Ginsberg Collection, with some South African Books from Other Collections.

Johannesburg Art Gallery

25 August to 27 October 1996

Ref: GB/4886