'Fictional Realities'
Through Feb. 20, Michael Martin Galleries

BOOKS MIGHT SEEM a little outdated in these days of virtual communications and paperless offices. But there's something about their physicality – the way you can touch and hold them and even tear them apart – that appeals to East Bay artist Shawn Smith. For his latest series of works, "Fictional Realities," Smith carefully selected four literary sources: George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Roald Dahl's short story "Royal Jelly." Then he shredded, punched, baked, and even sugar coated their pages, transforming them into shapes that include a pair of boots, a candy sampler box, and a TV dinner. There's definitely something irreverent and fun about these pieces, with their fanciful forms and punning references to food and eating – "digestible" prose, for instance, or a "consuming" read. But the artist's relationship with books and their authors isn't as flippant as it sounds at first. Smith may render his source materials more or less unreadable, but his creations are awe-inspiring for their meticulous, laborious construction. There's no doubt he's spent many long and thoughtful hours with them, reading and interpreting before beginning his creative acts of destruction/deconstruction. Smith's previous work addressed weighty issues such as race relations; this new series looks at imagined worlds – alternate realities that authors flesh out by stringing words together. Tolstoy, the largest piece in the show, echoes this process of stringing- and fleshing-out. Over the course of three years, Smith hole-punched the entire surface out of each page of the author's notoriously long tome. He then threaded together the tiny bits of paper and hung them on the wall in the shape of Tolstoy's portrait. Tues.-Fri., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 101 Townsend, Suite 207, S.F. (415) 543-1550. (Lindsey Westbrook)