Jack Ginsberg Centre for the Book Arts

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The Be Careful Pop-up Book
If You Look Hard Enough You can See Your Future

Item date(s): 2013

Stephen Hobbs - (book artist)
Ingrid Schindall

Pages: unpaged
Size: 300mm
Edition: #3/12

Type: Pop-up
Sub-type: Movable books

Place publication: Johannesburg
Publisher: David Krut Projects
Cat. 252-C6b ZA
Exhibition 2017; 2019

Additional notes:
The artist's signature, the edition size and date can be seen through a peep-hole in the final pop-up of the book.

Bound in decorated cloth with no title.

From the catalogue: The limited edition artist's pop-up book functions as the binding work of the exhibition, encompassing Hobbs' conceptual practice of engaging the field of architecture as a site for visionary thinking. The work itself is s aofrm of paper architecture, concealing within its two dimentiosn extraordinary three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. The book was conceptualised with Ingrid Schindall, a printmaker specialising in book-binding and paper engineering, who spent some time at DKW beween February and April. The work contains ten silkscreened, clack and white double page spreads, six of which contain pop-ups of variable moving mechanics. The spreads include found text and handwritten mind-maps, stylised networks and city grids, scaffolding and empty billboard structures, blocked patterns and optical illusions, which team up with the imaginative wonderment of the paper engineering techniques to demand an absorptive process of looking. As a fictional urban environment between two covers, createdin the visual language that emerged through the development of the prints, woodblocks and trial proof manipulations, the pop-up book is symbolic of the 'imagined space in which we live.'

the decision to work only with balck and white in the book also provides a visual link to dazzle caouflage, a zebra-like pattern used particularly on gunships in the early 1900s to fragment the visual field of enemy sites in combat situations. Although dazzle patterning vecame obsolete ater World War I, Hobbs has mined the potential that such visual deception presents for aesthetic reflection on the dystopian city, in this case the complex and abstract nature of processing information in frenzied urban environments. In Hobbs' practice as a whole, and in this case the visual language of his imagined city, the classic dualisms of utopia=dystopia, order-chaos, plan-counterplan are too static to capture the delirious urban dynamic in which he is most interested. For him, the empty billboard, the building in progress, and the illustory grid are more significant of the endless loop between material and imagination that constitutes the informal proliferation, the unruly eveoution of the developing city. - Jacqueline Nurse.

Exhibition notes:
Exhibited at the exhibition "Be Careful In the Working Radius" at David Krut, Johannesburg in June 2013.

Item 0252 - C6b ZA on Booknesses: Artists' books from the Jack Ginsberg Collection.

UJ Art Gallery, University of Johannesburg

25 March to 5 May 2017

Samplings: South African Artists' Books

Basement Gallery, WAM

26 March to 6 July 2019

Ref: GB/13949

Images courtesy David Krut Projects