Approach to the Site

Artist Timothy C. Ely American, born 1949

Publisher Water Street Press, New York, 1986

Date1986

Dimensionsslipcase: 14 7/8 x 11 3/8 x 1 1/2 in. (378 x 289 x 38mm)
book: 14 5/8 x 10 7/8 x 3/4 in. (372 x 277 x 19mm)
page: 14 1/4 x 10 5/8 in. (362 x 270mm)

MediumOriginal binding: painted boards with collaged design Original prints: offset lithographs in colors Text: photolithography Paper: Arches ivory wove paper, watermarked

ClassificationBooks

Credit LineGift of Molly and Walter Bareiss

Object number

1987.285

Not on View

Collections

Works on Paper

Exhibition HistorySplendid Pages: The Molly and Walter Bareiss Collection of Modern Illustrated Books, Feb. 14--May 11, 2003Label TextTimothy C. Ely, Approach to the Site (1986) Tim Ely wrote the following statement about his book Approach to the Site: “Approach to the Site is a metaphoric excursion to and into ‘the archetypal library.’ The library is the locator (a la Borges) of the optical center of an arc. I have been fascinated for all of my working life by the dynamic of libraries and their ability to coalesce culture and act as a mirror of the time in which they are contained. Museums hold a similar fascination but without the shuffle. As a mirror of the heavens, the archetypal library was liberally applied across the Egyptian landscape for millennia as a way to bestow universal order on Earth, as reflected in the alchemical maxim ‘As Above, So Below’. In Approach to the Site, I wanted to pay homage to the cartographic experience I had at Suzzallo Library on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle in 1973. I opened a drawer only to find a very large map of the face of Mars. Here was an aspect of landscape painting I had overlooked and I realized that the land could be annotated from above. I was transformed and returned to the studio to work on my first “atlas.” I also discovered on that same trip, my interest in the incomprehensible, as I looked upon “Atlas’s” [sic] written in Chinese or Russian. Math and science books in these same languages looked correct but I could grasp little. Much of the ground work for my later efforts was laid at a very early age and the above notations are only a pair of illogical koans [riddles used in Zen Buddhism to aid in meditation] of the sort that turn one on the path of true following. The unseen is rarely invisible.”