*You can almost feel the date

The Kohler Art Library is thrilled to welcome distinguished visual artist and poet Jen Bervin to campus for the ninth annual Bernstein Book Arts Lecture. This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Bervin’s multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Her research-driven work explores the embodied, visual, and tactile dimensions of language, often through collaborations with artists, scholars, and scientists. Her artists’ books are carefully considered encapsulations of this research, which often stretches years. For these books, Bervin creates artifacts reflecting or translating the original object she encounters in libraries, archives, or laboratories. She spends considerable time investigating archives, meditating on their meaning before re-creating specific elements–often through handmade paper or facsimiles–and assembling them into portable archival collections for the reader to explore. Careful looking rewards the reader, revealing layers of poetic significance and offering a glimpse into the immersive process that Bervin undertakes.