Brian Dettmer, Hyde Park Art Center

Last week, I came across Brian Dettmer’s work, and my jaw dropped. I spent a good deal of time staring at his impossibly intricate book pieces, and was reminded a bit of Jen Stark’s work.

After posting a link to Dettmer’s photos on GapersBlock, a reader wrote in to say that his work was on display over at the Hyde Park Art Center. Liz and I decided to make our way over to check out the exhibit.

This is the first thing you see, on walking inside.

In walking around looking for the right gallery, we wound up on a back room where a lot of construction was taking place. We stumbled across this great little piece of paper…

Nearby, we found a garbage bag chock full of these guys. It took a lot of will to leave these be, and not try to take all of them with us.

We found the gallery upstairs, and the walkway up was adorned with an incredibly intricate display made of paper cutouts.

Paper display, detail. I don’t even want to think how long this must have taken.

Corridor to Gallery 4.

Looking in. The Hyde Park Art Center is a fantastic gallery space. If you’ve never been, I can’t recommend it enough.

Seeing a book up close was really neat. I ended up pouring over the words, getting lost looking at all the exposed pages (and the pages in between).

Book detail. It’s all too easy to try to read the book like some kind of artist statement…

… or poem.

Top view. I’m hoping this shot better displays how many layers there are – and how long it must have taken to do all this.

Another nearb book, composed primarily of images.

Book detail. I liked how, even though they were unrelated, the mind wants to stitch things together and force some kind of narrative.

Nearby, we found a small installation entitled Away with the Fairies, by Lucy Baxandall.

Ground view.

Detail view – Liz pointed out the stems of the mushrooms were tiny stacks of paper, and wondered if the artist used a hole-punch to laboriously build each one of these guys.

Detail view – photo by Liz.

Both Dettmer and Baxandall’s work are on display at the Hyde Park Art Center, and are part of a series entitled Another Story. The exhibit opened on August 12, and runs until October 7.