Every second year since 2007, Seager Gray Gallery has been honored to be part of the Codex Book Fair and Symposium, bringing together the best of the best book artists and fine press printers from around the world to share their work, explore new and old concepts, and to start an on-going conversation about the fate and future of the book as an essential art form.

The night before the fair, it has been our tradition to invite an artist to do an installation in the gallery. This year we are pleased to have Inge Bruggeman’s exhibition, Deposits, which opens on Saturday, February 2 from 5:00 to 7:30.

Inge Bruggeman’s work revolves around the idea of the book — the book as object, artifact and cultural icon. She is interested in the act of creative publishing and the diverse materials and approaches this has taken across cultures and across time. She is particularly focused on the evolution of the book & publication arts in a post-digital age. The book continues to be an inherently interdisciplinary, interactive, and mixed media environment to explore — one that holds a powerful history of free speech, creative expression, and the democratic multiple at its heart.

Inge makes artist books, fine press publications, prints, and other text-based art that investigates our personal and collective relationship to the shifting role of the book, print media and text in our world today. Inge has an avid interest in the history of the French livre d’artiste and the contemporary artist book in France.

Deposits is the second in a series of artist book projects made for active reading. The books in this series are meant as artifacts of experiential reading, while videos preserve the events when not installed. This series will culminate as a group of works in an active reading room. Deposits is a book meant to be read while ascending a ladder. The text is a collection of memories that are embedded in a kind of geological strata. The book was printed as part of a residency at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 2016 and completed in 2018. It was also supported by a Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant from the University of Nevada Reno. When installed the looping sound element is set low to lure the reader/viewer up the ladder, closer to the voice.