Wednesday Exhibitions: Simon Redington's BOMB

Simon Redington's BOMB (2008)

 Welcome to this week's Wednesday Exhibitions, featuring another piece from the Center for Book Arts' current exhibition: Fine & Dirty: Contemporary Letterpress Art, on view until March 31st! Today we shall be looking at Simon Redington's amazing and beautifully-colored book, BOMB.

A woodcut print from BOMB

Redington's piece is based on the poem BOMB, written in 1958 by Gregory Corso, described as "a heart-felt homage to the terror of the H-Bomb." For the 50th anniversary of its publication, Redington worked for Kamikaze Press to produce this piece, featuring the original text with an artwork all his own. Most of the images in Redington's work were created with woodcuts, printed onto thick white paper that enhances the vibrancy of his piece.

One of my favorite parts of Redington's book is his outstanding use of color. The first page of the book, seen above, takes the image of a terrified soldier and uses a beautiful fade from red to black. For a book about the destructive force of the hydrogen bomb, Redington is not reduced to a nuclear-winter scheme of blacks and greys, but uses bold, bright images. The woodcut (right) mixes black with the starling reds and yellows against a soft blue background, enhancing the vibrancy of the already bright colors. The image of the America flag below even uses a hot, shocking pink!

Two-page spread of BOMB

Another particularly beautiful part of Redington's book is his use of layering images. The soldier on the cover page of BOMB is sheer enough to see both the reverse-printed title and the blue background behind it, giving the image both depth and a powerful, even haunting quality. This translucent distance is complemented by the opaque text superimposed on top of the soldier, boldly announcing itself to the reader. The image, left, is a particularly striking example of Redington's use of multiple press runs to create depth. The large translucent star on the left side appears ethereal, hovering both beneath and above the dancer. The doves at right are even more powerful: a white symbol of peace is covered with reds and blues, just sheer enough to still see the white beneath. These layers do not only show an explosion of color on the page, but also makes the birds, from a distance, into a completely different image of chaos and confusion. This, together with the powerful text of the poem floating on top ("It flows thru/the death of me"), creates an incredible and imaginative piece, loaded with emotion, to which images just do not do justice!

Redington's BOMB, a part of the CBA's main exhibition, Fine & Dirty, as well and many others (including everything in our past Wednesday Exhibitions!) can be seen until March 31st, 2012. As always, admission to our exhibits is free, so stop on by Monday-Saturday and see them before they're gone!

For more information about Fine & Dirty and other exhibitions currently on display, visit http://www.centerforbookarts.org/exhibits/

-Christina Squitieri

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