Lisa Kokin at Donna Seager Gallery

The February exhibition at Donna Seager Gallery promises to be unlike anything you’ve seen here before. Two years in the planning, this one-person installation by artist Lisa Kokin will expand the viewer’s idea of art and artist books as well. The exhibition will run from February 3 to March 15, 2009. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, February 13 from 6 to 8pm and a gallery talk with the artist on Sunday, March 8 at 3pm. A catalog of the exhibition is available through the gallery at $20 with images of works and an essay by Paul Liberatore.

At this mature point in her career, says Liberatore, the 54-year-old Bay Area artist has achieved a level of prominence in the contemporary art world that invites comparisons in aesthetics, content and use of materials to Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. For the past two decades, Kokin has been in the forefront of an emerging new art form: the artist’s book, hence the title of the exhibition at Donna Seager Gallery: Ex Libro, meaning not only "from the book," but in Lisa Kokin's mischievous world of layered puns, "formerly a book."

Through her process of art making, Kokin explores cultural and personal issues of conformity and gender, the ambiguities of society and human behavior. Her investigations include bisexuality, her Jewish heritage, her devotion to universal struggles for social justice and against censorship. Her aesthetic in these meanderings is consistently refined and appealing. These works are forms to hold meaning, but the forms themselves are incredibly alluring and stand alone as works of art even before the viewer unravels the hidden clues to content and context and often humor contained within.

Catalog Essay by Paul Liberatore