Conceptualist “book artist” Linda Ekstrom has long been known to have her own personal way with books, to unique artistic ends. A professor at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies for more than two decades, Ekstrom is the subject of a fascinating retrospective exhibition opening the new Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art season, exploring her love of books — including the Bible — and her love of deconstructing the physical objects, fastidiously reshaping pages and minute lines of text. Deconstruction leads to new and tangled meanings.
That latter part of the process has fomented some controversy in the extensive Westmont show, called Straddling Circumference, with some at the Christian college calling foul at the prospect of Ekstrom’s “desecration” of the Holy Bible. Ekstrom has shown her work in various art spaces around town, and beyond, for a few decades, but context matters in a Christian university setting. She stirred controversy over one work shown in a Westmont exhibition in the 1990s — “Sophia’s Logos,” also in the current show. But with this exhibition, the art and the artist stretch out in the full regalia and overview of a Biblical reviser, with intellectual and spiritual seeker credentials in check.
Kudos to the museum’s director and curator Judy Larson for facilitating this deserving retrospective tribute to an important and distinctive Santa Barbara–based artist.