Mixed Media > Partition

This piece consists of two books, The High Walls of Jerusalem by Roland Sanders and Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler. The pages have been cut lengthwise into one-inch-wide sections that are stacked one on top of the other to reveal every printed page of text as an abstract line resembling a densely compressed EEG mapping. This new configuration of printed matter is glued along the top or bottom (rather than the side) edges of the original pages and set into an L-shaped wooden armature which functions as a bookend in both senses of the word. These reconfigured and re-bound books not only support other tomes, but stand metaphorically as a set of partitioned objects that references both the wall constructed between the Israelis and Palestinians and the parting of the Red Sea during the Jewish exodus from Egypt into the “promised land.”