cover image About to Happen

About to Happen

Cecilia Vicuña. Siglio (D.A.P., dist.), $32.95 trade paper (148p) ISBN 978-1-938221-15-6

By turns visual and literary, autobiographical and political, this artist’s book, which accompanies an exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, explores the mixed-media work of Chilean artist and poet Vicuña. Detailed photographs of Vicuña’s work, often featuring abrupt and sculptural changes to a variety of landscapes, are punctuated by meditations on earth, water, and progress: “If the memory of an event is a ‘trace’ in the land, the actions that took place long ago are ‘etched’ there, but ‘long ago’ may become tomorrow at anytime!” Vicuña writes. Or perhaps it is the meditations that are punctuated by the photographs, supplementing Vicuña’s lyric treatises with images of her studied alterations to environments ranging from the seashore to the courtyard outside a Chilean palace. “An object is not an object; it is a witness to a relationship,” she writes, and indeed this book bears witness to those changing, often fraught relationships even as it creates an additional relationship to which the reader bears witness: that of the interplay between image and language. Concluding with a series of interviews with the artist, this book provides a comprehensive look at the ethical and aesthetic impulses that drive Vicuña’s practice. Color illus. (Apr.)