Audrey Niffenegger is probably best known for her New York Times bestseller (and soon to be movie) “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” a work whose success earned her worldwide recognition and a five-million-dollar advance on her upcoming novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry.” Prior to her literary fame, Niffenegger was (and more importantly, still is) a highly regarded Chicago artist. A professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and faculty member at the North Shore Art League, Niffenegger’s illustrations from her short story “The Night Bookmobile” are presently on display at Printworks Gallery. Serialized for The Guardian in 2008, “The Night Bookmobile” is the story of a woman obsessed with a mysterious traveling library and the disturbingly familiar books it contains. “The Night Bookmobile” is told in thirty installments, each page featuring brightly colored illustrations and sidelined text. Niffenegger’s art has often been compared to Edward Gorey’s, and justifiably so: her work incorporates the same stark, haunting figures and her stories, like Gorey’s, are often dark and chimerical. Niffenegger’s drawings, however, are more intimate than Gorey’s and, even when dealing with death, they manage to be infused with life. “The Night Bookmobile” is a remarkable story, and strong enough to stand alone as just that, but Niffenegger’s illustrations manage to transform it into a vivid and lingering work. Though it is easily accessed online, Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Night Bookmobile” is a work you will want to see up close. (Jaime Calder)
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
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