Susan Sironi, ""Forget Me Not," 2014, altered book

Susan Sironi limits her creative palette to two tools and one medium. Using scissors, scalpels, and books, she performs high artistic alchemy by transforming published material--bound volumes of image and text--into astonishing wall works and sculptures. She does this by cutting pages out of books so that, properly installed, they become three-dimensional curiosities: shadow boxes filled with densely wound paper intestines, bouquets of tiny flowers bursting out of narrow frames, piles of paper "confetti" inviting viewer interaction. For the current exhibition, Sironi has ringed the walls of Offramp Gallery with a 48-foot-long Timeline that situates collaged material under fragments of text--specifically, notes the artist made to herself as she worked in the studio. The pictorial surfaces float below a sheath of Plexiglas on which silkscreened words are scattered like the syncopated notes that roll off of a Player Piano scroll.

For over forty thousand years, human beings have made marks on flat surfaces, producing what we today call “art” — whether it's a cave wall in Cantabria, Spain or a sheet of paper in a Pasadena art space. These marks resonate forward through history, reminding us of our enduring connections. How might an archaeologist of the twenty-second or twenty-third century understand our era through Susan Sironi's art? How, for example, might the horizontal frieze of Timeline illuminate our existence? Humans are the meaning-making animals; what kind of meaning is being constructed here? 

One way to "read" Sironi's Timeline is as a topography of perception. The expansive recumbent plane suggests an open landscape, seen from above in an aerial photograph. The irregular shapes dotted across the white background recall islands. (Are they islands of earth? Archipelagos of thought?) They hover beside curvilinear streams of water or walkways. (Where does one stand? Is this mind mapping?) The broken words and staccato gray phrases move across the landscape like flashes of code that mediate the viewer's direct access to the underlying narrative. The Timeline is seductively attractive — we are drawn to its suggestive visuals — but the complex layering of image and text frustrates immediate or easily contained comprehension. If the Timeline is understood as a diagram of the unconscious, it contains fractured messages percolating up to awareness that only to slide back into half meanings. Like each one of Sironi's cut books, the Timeline is a puzzle that only yields its effect over time.

The relationship between image and text is exquisitely challenged throughout Susan Sironi's oeuvre. Books are activated as imagery — often abstract imagery — and that tacitly produces a vacillating relationship with the original content. The artist selects vintage volumes that address topics as varied as flower arranging to movie stars, then sculpts them into quiet reflections on how we know and record the world. Printed books are no longer limited to the containment and presentation of knowledge, but become malleable objects of considered perception. Under Sironi's deft hand, they also become archives of visual delight, fragile vessels of memory.