A review of Gail Hastings’ ebook Missing by Isobel Parker Philip entitled The pure potential of a page is published, today, on The Art Life.
Hastings uses the term ‘sculptuation’ to define her practice. This is a term that marries ‘sculpture’ with ‘situation’ so as to shift focus away from the individuated sculptural object and towards the spatial scheme it delineates. […] We dip in and out of the space of the work; interpreting it from afar as distanced observers while simultaneously occupying territory contained within its circumference. Whether consciously or not, we are implicated in the work. We inhabit its topography. Can an e-book be enlisted to perform the same function as these object-based works? Can its screened images — floating inaccessible in the data cloud — coerce the viewer into the same tidal pull as their physical counterparts? […] Why should a virtual book ape the form of a physical book? Surely it can possess its own architecture and pioneer its own pathways. Hastings’ work not only recognizes the possibility of such an architecture, it lays the foundations.
Isobel Parker Philip, The pure potential of a page, 25 April 2014
Missing: four sculptuations by Gail Hastings with a foreword by the art historian Richard Shiff will be released tomorrow on iBooks, Saturday, 26 April 2014.