Horizons… Capri

Horizons… Capri

Pigment inkjet prints, gold-stamped vellum spine. Created 2011.

5.5 x 8 x .5”
unnumbered series of 30, cover wrappers vary
16 pages.

The painting that hung over the bookmaker’s childhood sofa; photographed, digitally printed actual size, deconstructed, and bound using the drum leaf structure. When this view of the island of Capri overlooking the Gulf of Naples is divided into eight equal portions, each portion still reads as a horizon. A fragmented walk through the landscape may also function as metaphor for memory, and the unanswered questions that elude memory.

With her latest project, Karen Hanmer has created an archetype of all the family oil paintings that hung above the couches of our childhood. Not a drop of irony stains the languid shorelines and gauzy, cloud-flecked skies that fill the pages of this inviting book. Hanmer instead chooses to treat her subject with a candid reverence that raises intriguing questions about how we assign value to the objects that circumscribe our lives and how memory impacts that process.

—Vera Scekic, Chicago painter and curator