The Stars

by Celmins, Vija

• ISBN13: 9780870707049
• ISBN10: 0870707043
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-31
• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art

Summary

"The New York artist Vija Celmins has made many images of the night sky - paintings, drawings, and prints of gorgeous richness. In The Stars she and the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger devote an artist's book to the theme. Celmins created three prints for the project, which she also designed. One print, inspired by the worn binding of an early twentieth-century Japanese book, becomes the volume's mottled deep-blue cover. The second is a negative image of the night sky - dark stars on a pale ground. The third etching suggests an open screen composed of sky and stars. For the text, Weinberger has assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources. This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, the text supplements Celmins's images visually as well as verbally."--BOOK JACKET.