Josiah McElheny: Libraries: With a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny

In Libraries, Josiah McElheny continues his ongoing investigation of ways that concepts of “the infinite” have been translated throughout history into images, and how these pictorial structures connect to societal values of diversity, individuality and interconnectedness. 

The formal and conceptual beginnings of this exhibition are found in the vast, hexagonal library described by Jorge Luis Borges in his famous short story The Library of Babel. In this text, the world—or the universe itself—is a library of infinitely diverse types of potential knowledge, contained within a never-ending set of interlocking hexagonal rooms. This organization of space equates knowledge itself with its endless possibility for expansiveness and difference. McElheny suggests, “Maybe it’s not that truth is malleable, but rather it’s that knowledge is expandable. And there are also so many kinds of knowledge, new types that we have never even looked for—that’s where possibility lies.”

Portrait of a Library is a four-channel film installation created as a multi-year long collaboration between McElheny and the filmmaker Jeff Preiss. The work was created out of footage captured onsite at an expansive personal library collection focused on wondrous, improbable fields of knowledge. Built out of many different types of layered, scanned and color-offset moving imagery—from 16mm film, VHS video tape footage to 35 mm slide-projections, all often re-filmed again 16mm—the images combine to form serendipitous and magical visual accidents. The result is a hypnotic, cinematic environment that argues for a world where insight and sanity can be found in the search, and re-search, for understanding of the incomprehensible, as a form of knowledge as essential as any other.

Josiah McElheny (b. 1966, Boston, MA) has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA (2019); Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2018); MAK Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2013), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England (2011), Museo de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2007), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2007), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2002), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2001), The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (1999) and the Seattle Art Museum, WA (1995).  His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Tate Modern, London, UK among others. McElheny lives and works in New York, New York.

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