A book is worth a thousand words

Jennifer Khoshbin uses books as sculpture to tell stories without words

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: October 10th, 2008 | 4:35pm

Every book tells a story. Every book touched by Jennifer Khoshbin, however, tells a multitude of stories. The 40-year-old artist carves into them, taking a musty old book and turning it into a dynamic new piece of art.

"I’m tunneling into vintage hardbound texts," the San Antonio resident states, "to explore the dubious future of the book itself." Khoshbin is trying to imagine what it might be like for books to undergo a kind of adaptation for survival. Using books as sculpture, she's taking the paper — thin, one-dimensional — and finding depth and conceptions of astounding delicacy.

Oftentimes she adds line drawings or photo images to re-script the story. She picks dusty old books to use, old books "that will never get picked off the shelves, so I feel I am liberating them to become something new." Once she chooses a book, based on its age or its relevance, she looks through archives of drawings and photographs to decide what it is she wants to express. From here, something wholly original — with an eye towards the past -— is born.

Married to philosopher Paul Lewis, with two kids, Raphael and Ruby, Khoshbin has shown her work in Texas at FISHEAD Design Studio & Microgallery, Southwest School of Art & Craft, and Luminaria. She has shows forthcoming at Stella Haus Gallery in San Antonio, Tinlark Gallery in Hollywood, and the Bellevue Arts Museum near Seattle. "I've only shown work in the last year or so, really," she admits, which is quite impressive with the skills Khoshbin certainly possesses.

"I come from a family of artists," explains Khoshbin. Master carpenters are in her family tree. So are potters, filmmakers, curators, and new media artists. "You could say it's in my blood stream."

Nostalgia and the memory of childhood also stream through her work. "One compositional theme I have not been able to escape or exhaust has to do with the line between rewriting and remembering the past,” she says. “The nostalgia of childhood experience produces a number of questions: How clearly can one remember past experiences? How can one recover a worldview free of adult limitations and anxieties? How do we rewrite our own stories?"

Khoshbin rewrites stories with every project she undertakes, every book she pulls off the shelf, and every inspiration that flashes in her head.

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View more of Khoshbin’s work online at jenkhoshbin.com.