Helen Mirra: The 3 Clouds (Christoph Keller Editions)

Helen Mirra, born in 1970 in Rochester, New York, creates work from simple materials–including worn clothing and wood recovered from transportation palettes–at the intersection of influences including Arte Povera and Fluxus. She also writes, and for the past few years her writing has come in the form of indexes. Dislocated from a source text, the entries, lettered on long strips of cloth tape that resemble typewriter ribbons, unspool into the world at large. Like clash, 247, her index to a volume of William James essays, this volume tracks words and ideas through John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). If the original text, in this case, is largely about the conceptualization of ideas, Mirra’s index is a materialization of conceptualization, under the auspices of a spare poetics. Mirra, who had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002 and participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale, also teaches at Harvard University.