Ruby City announces the acquisition of Nina Katchadourian’s series BookPace (2002) for the Linda Pace Foundation Collection/Ruby City.  The acquisition includes 11 photographs which are also a part of her project Sorted Books (1993-ongoing) and are documented in a 2013 monograph of the same title. Katchadourian works in a variety of mediums including performance, photography, sound, video and sculpture. As in the BookPace series of photographs, her projects often directly or indirectly incorporate a collaborative element or person to which she creatively responds. Also noteworthy is her consistent use of constraints as productive fodder that spark her creative instincts, enabling her to address her subjects with both rigor and playfulness. “This addition to the Collection,” director Elyse A. Gonzales declares, “further enhances our conceptual photography holdings by an artist who consistently reveals, through her innovative approach, the unseen potential of mundane materials or information to reflect the profound and humorous nature of all that surrounds us.”

Katchadourian’s ongoing series of photographs Sorted Books is based on books she selects and organizes according to the titles on their spines. As she states, this portraiture project originated “in the act of looking very carefully, responding to specific situations and working with limited means.” In 2002, Pace commissioned the artist to make a series based on her library. Katchadourian notes that “combining books from different parts of the house—mixing the public with private—became the focus.” The series, BookPace consists of pithy, humorous and poignant statements about art, grief, dreams and myths all of which reflected Pace’s areas of research and passions. 

The BookPace suite of photographs represents the first major acquisition of Katchadourian’s work by the Foundation and joins several others that use photography to innovatively portray individuals through objects they own, such as Chuck Ramirez’s Purse Portraits or Adam Schreiber’s suite of prints documenting Linda Pace’s home after her death. This conceptual approach also matches other works in the Collection by artists such as Tony Feher, Doris Salcedo and Annette Messager which rely on ordinary materials to address complex emotion or thought. Additionally, the BookPace series joins works by Daniel Joseph Martinez and Jenny Holzer which highlight the creative potential of text.