June 2- 8, 2005

artpicks

Shhh! I'm Trying to Read!

by Andrew Parks

Art

The comforting, familiar smell of musty pages. The pleasurable searches through stacks for Chuck Palahniuk's latest or an aged copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. An afternoon at the Free Library on Vine sure can save us from office spaces and studio apartments. Its sit-up-straight wooden chairs, cramped reading areas and tagged 1985 computer screens can also make you want to never visit that dump again. Anyone who's ever left the library with the latter impression, muttering expletives all the way to a car stamped with a parking ticket, should visit Space 1026's gallery space this month for its installation called "The Free Library." Feeling tired? Sink into a candy-cane-red beanbag. Feeling inspired? Scope silk-screened posters, self-published zines, stylized T-shirt templates and handcrafted stickers, on display from an international group of graphic designers and artists. Feeling generous? Visit the "circulation desk" at the back of the gallery and buy a limited number of posters and publications.

"In the current political climate, all of those '60s/'70s utopian, DIY impulses are very much back in people's minds," explains curator Mark Owens. "The show aims to draw on that and allow the gallery to move away from being a place where work is shown to more of a hangout space."

Owens says he was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise (the story of young French radicals who remodel a Paris flat into a revolutionary space) and New York City's Acorn School (built in 1973 with carpeting and circular seating rather than the usual cold linoleum floor and bolted desk design). That, and living in the 1970s with progressive teacher parents and a twin brother who shared a love of skateboarding and screening punk rock T-shirts and poster art.

"My brother and I are definitely products of that "soft '70s' type of child-rearing practices," says Owens. "We built our own toys."

"The Free Library," opening reception Fri., Jun. 3, 6-11 p.m., through June 25, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., 215-574-7630, www.space1026.com.