Flood-Dispersed Books Become Art

Photos from artist Micah Bloom’s Codex project (“involves film, photography, and installation”) is included in Ruminate‘s Spring 2014 issue. I encourage you to take a look as his artwork will hit the souls of any writer or reader. ” In an artist’s note he writes about how growing up, his family instilled in him a certain respect for books: “In our home, books were elevated in the hierarchy of objects; in their nature, deemed closer to humans than furniture, knickknacks, or clothing. Under these impressions I was forced into this relatinship with displaced books.” His work uses the books that were “strewn in streets, across roadways, along railroad tracks” after the Souris River ravaged Minot, North Dakota in June of 2011. “These books were vessels—surrogates of human soul, these shelters—housing our heritage—displaced, now driven over by boomtown commuters and shredded by oil tankers on their way from the Bakken oil fields. It was this surreal situation that stirred me to alter the fate of these books.”

And although I truly wish more information about the actual art rendering was including, it’s a pleasure just to flip through the pages. You can find a little more information by watching their (already funded) kickstart video.