David has installed a large floating city in the middle of the gallery entitled Semesterville. The work is created from discarded architectural models scavenged from CCA’s Spring 2007 and 2008 semesters.
Stein’s floating utopia imagines what it might be like if these projects were actually built.Semestervile brings to mind the hopefulness and optimism of student work when few of these buildings will ever be actualized.
Around the circumference of the gallery Stein displays his Unlikely Library. The Unlikely Library is a collection of hundreds of books whose existence is unlikely or improbable. Stein designed and created dust jackets for the unlikely books and wrapped them around existing books. He has also collected real books whose existence is improbable and they are interspersed throughout the collection.
We will be providing white gloves so that viewers can investigate which books are real and so that people can appreciate the juxtapositions of Stein’s made-up titles with the book’s actual content.
Examples of the books and their categories follow: books that have no use (Finished Crossword Puzzles, Tube Socks: A User’s Guide, Pedophile Jokes for Family Reunions), no audience (Etymology For The MTV Generation, Things That Are Smaller Than a Bread Box: A Useful Index For Games of 20 Questions, May 68 Riots for Dummies), are fantastical (Utopias That Worked, Disproved But I Still Believe It), no author (I was a Barbershop Quartet Groupie), senseless (Modernist Unicorn, Base Running the Old Testament Way), or are simply too mundane to be of this world (Wilmington Nightlife, Countries with A in the Name).
In small groupings, stretching around the exhibition space, this uncanny library hints at the boundaries of a publishing world – where hundred of thousands of titles are printed ever year and speaks to the overwhelming scale of cultural and commercial output.