Books and Boxes

For Sharif, books and boxes have the ability to act as the “frame” for a work of art, variously utilizing them as containers for photographs, objects, and pages inscribed with linguistic, visual, or numerical patterns. Sharif’s Books and Boxes illuminate his distinctive approach to artmaking. As he described in his seminal essay, “Weave,” first published in 2005: “[To create the] artwork is to cut something off from something else, to take that something you’ve just cut away and put it in a box, or on top of a box … and to affix a label beneath it that says: ‘this is a work of art.’ … A work of art is sticking pieces of different things together, using some adhesive material, or placing things side by side in a random pattern.” In this way, Sharif mimics and reiterates his distinctive “weaving” techniques while expanding on the Duchampian notion of stripping everyday objects of their original function. Sharif’s Books take the form of commonplace stationery books, or are composed of materials that are woven, cut, bound, and tied together to create book-like objects.