A latte now costs six dollars. Meanwhile, used book sales price foundational texts at cents. The contradiction is structural, not sentimental. Mass production collapsed the value of books as objects, and the publishing industry discards hundreds of millions of volumes each year due to overstock, age, or damage. What remains valuable is the information inside, even as its physical form is treated as waste.
That tension sits at the core of Brian Dettmer’s practice. An obsolete reference book is not a dead object to him but a dense archive of images, diagrams, and language waiting to be reactivated. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and guides—genres made redundant by digital search—become raw material.
In In·Formation, Dettmer’s solo exhibition at Riverside Arts Center, works produced over the past few years push collage and sculpture into three dimensions. Some pieces are wall-mounted reliefs built from spliced fragments. Others are freestanding forms carved directly into thick hardcovers. Pages are cut, layered, stacked, and packed into diorama-like interiors, revealing cross-sections of text and imagery that were never meant to coexist.
The process balances chance and control. As the gallery notes, “There is a randomness to what is revealed, followed by the thoughtfulness of what should remain.” Each incision removes material to expose hidden content, which Dettmer then edits and reassembles into a personal visual syntax. Redactions—such as obscured titles on book spines in works like Great Houses of Gardening Corners—mirror our unstable relationship with how information is filtered, prioritized, or withheld today.
In·Formation runs through January 24 in Riverside, Illinois, outside Chicago. More work is available on the artist’s website and Instagram.
