Beyond the Rectangle: An Artist Book as Vessels

By Marilyn Valiente

This artist book exhibit creates a dialogue between the familiar book as a repository of knowledge and the artist’s book as a perceptual and conceptual experience. In Marilyn Valiente’s practice, this expanded form becomes a territory for exploring memory, identity, belonging, and the fragile ways in which personal and family histories are preserved and reconstructed. For more information, please contact the branch at 305-375-2665 or fuenteso@mdpls.org. All ages.

Beyond the rectangle: an artist book as vessels
Marilyn Valiente
Curated by: Shirley Moreira

For centuries, the book has been one of our primary spaces for preserving, organizing, and transmitting knowledge. Its pages construct sequences, connect ideas, and allow experiences, memories, and thoughts to travel across time and reach the reader. The artist’s book emerges from this same communicative capacity while altering its codes: it no longer merely contains a work or a discourse but becomes the work itself. The page ceases to function solely as a support for text; image, material, texture, gesture, emptiness, folds, and the very structure of the book all participate in the construction of meaning. Reading, then, also becomes an act of looking, touching, navigating, and discovering. Beyond the rectangle: an artist book as vessels, an exhibition by artist Marilyn Valiente, is situated precisely within this territory of displacement. Presented in the context of the Main Library, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between two ways of understanding the book: one we recognize as a repository and transmitter of knowledge, and another that, through the visual arts, expands this function into a perceptual and conceptual experience. The artist’s book retains something essential to the act of reading, the intimacy, the discovery, the progression from one fragment to another, while disrupting the expectation of an exclusively verbal and linear reading. Each object establishes its own rules, transforming the viewer into a reader of images, materials, symbols, and associations.

In Marilyn Valiente’s practice, this expansion of the book finds continuity within an artistic inquiry deeply connected to memory, identity, and a sense of belonging. Personal experience, family history, and ties to places of origin are permeated by questions about what remains when spaces change and how we reconstruct our identities through remembrance. Text and image coexist with traces, fragments, and superimpositions that seem to operate much like memory itself: never entirely linear, never entirely stable. Throughout her practice, references to places of origin, the women in her family, and the narratives that shape our perception of ourselves have constructed a cartography in which the personal intersects with more universal questions of origin, absence, permanence, and transformation.

Her background and experience in psychology, together with her interest in archetypes and spirituality, add another dimension to these explorations. Within her books, the physical space of the page can also be understood as an interior space: a territory where images, words, and signs make visible what belongs to subjective experience. Materiality thus acquires a symbolic dimension. Accumulating, stitching, layering, transferring an image, or interrupting a surface become actions through which to speak about what is remembered, what disappears, and what, even after being transformed, continues to remain part of us.

The exhibition thus invites us to reconsider what it means to open a book. Alongside the volumes that naturally inhabit the library and await interpretation through words, Valiente’s books propose another kind of reading. They, too, contain knowledge, but a form of knowledge that cannot necessarily be translated into a definition or a phrase. It emerges from the relationship between thought and matter, memory and image, the
artist’s intimate experience and the experience of the viewer.

To move outside the confines of the rectangle means, in this sense, much more than abandoning the conventional boundaries of an artistic surface. It means expanding the possibilities of the book and, with them, the ways in which we construct knowledge. The book ceases to be solely something we read and becomes something we navigate, question, and experience: an object capable of containing not only stories, but memory,
presence, and the most diverse ways of understanding and recognizing ourselves.

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