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Massive Pop Up Book

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Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson is an artist who has shown her drawings and paintings with Bellwether, PS1, The Drawing Center, The Warhol Museum, the Grolier Club, Josee Bienvenue Gallery, PPOW, and many other spaces. Her work has been reviewed in the NY Times, Art in America, Time Out NY, the Village Voice, as well as other publications. Amy now show with Bravin Lee Programs in NYC. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts(1995) and her MFA from Yale (1997). She teaches in the Art History, Fine Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies departments at SVA. amy-wilson.com

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Massive pop-up book. This is what I worked on all day. This picture doesn’t do it justice at all, but I got the most nightmarish part (from an engineering point of view) done.

So what you’re looking at here is the book spread open and these trees coming out of the middle of it. The pages are about 10” each (so a spread of 20”) and then the trees go up to about 24” tall. It’s an “assisted pop-up” (yes, I made that up…I think) which means it pops up with some help. Basically, the whole thing comes apart and can be assembled and re-assembled – parts are glued into the book, other parts will come packaged with the book in an accompanying envelope and you have to add them, but then you can take the whole thing apart and shrink it down into this little 10? x 10? thing when you’re done with it.

Figuring out how to make it grow tall was the hard part; having it go wide (and I eventually want it to be 30’ or something crazy like that) is really easy – that’s just a matter of accordion-folding. But this tall part…that was really hard. So I’m pleased to have it mostly figured out for now. Now I just have to leave the thing set up in my studio for a few weeks to see what effect gravity has on it – will it droop? fall over? and so on. And then I’ll make adjustments after that. And then, once all that’s done, I can get to work on the actual piece – at this point, it’s all basic architecture; there’s no art really until I get the form all figured out. (I also want to make stuff that’s much taller but the point is: what I did today gives me hope. It should just be scalable from here on out. Maybe.)

When I showed John at the gallery my drawing of the gigantic pop-up, he nervously asked me, “But you’re going to use cheats, right? Like the whole thing doesn’t have to totally pop-up on its own?” I took it as a really sweet way of saying, Please don’t die of a pop-up book-inflicted nervous breakdown. And yeah – this thing has cheats galore. It does, however, still fold up all the way, which I’m psyched for. And if I got this much done in a day – a day torn in half by the sight of skinless goats, no less! – I’m feeling pretty good about what I can get done over the next few weeks.