What Say I?  

I like variety. As I work on my book sculptures, I am usually working on four or five other non-book pieces. Although the end result may be the creation of seemingly disparate work, there is a connective and thematic thread that runs through it all: exposing and reinventing the familiar until it becomes a new thing. I’ve tried to do that with discarded, orphaned books. Books are an aging and (some think) soon to be obsolete technology. So why do I destroy them, cut them up and seal them shut for eternity? My long-standing interest in books has driven me to repurpose themto find a new chapter for them as aesthetic, otherly objects; reconfigured yet still embedded with content. 

Laurel Paley is an artist, art instructor, and occasional art reviewer and writer, living and working in Downtown Los Angeles. She teaches art at Los Angeles City College and lectures about numerous art topics. Her resume includes exhibits in alternative spaces, galleries, and museums, including her traveling, communal, participatory performance installation, The Longest Potholder. Her art is in private and corporate collections. 

Many Lives springs from an ongoing body of work in several media—drawing, painting, photography, digital imaging, and performance. The photographic, lithographic monotypes in "Exposing Matter" capture the “life cycles” of the individual images. Not surprisingly, the images become more interesting and rich as they “age” and transform.

Although the installation changes to respond to the sites where it is displayed, the prints in 

Many Lives are always displayed in the chronological order in which they are printed. 

Susan Mathison is a street photographer from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California. With a master's degree in film production from UCLA, she began taking one photo a day on her iPhone in 2012 as part of the Facebook photography project “365.” The ongoing project has resulted in Susan’s emergence as a street photographer with a growing archive of daily photographs eight years in the making. Susan’s photos have been published on three covers of the Chicago Quarterly Review and have merited a 2016 solo show, ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL, at the Tandem Art Space in Silver Lake.

“Life is full of extraordinary things within the everyday. Those are the moments I am committed to bringing to light in my work. Things that are unnoticed or fleeting. I often use an iPhone to take photos, because it is easy to grab an image with it. But with any photo, I am looking for something that is hidden—some unnoticed beauty or humanity, some comedy or mystery.  Sometimes I will crop a photo to find it. I think of my daily photo as a practice in seeing and honoring the subtleties and stories of daily life.”