Ocean View Branch Library
345 Randolph Street
Words Fly Away by John Wehrle – 2003/2004
This is a fabulous piece for a library. John Wehrle imagined the library interior as a metaphor for a book. He covered the library in jumbled letters, words and pictures.
According to the artist’s website: Created in 2004, Worlds Fly Away is a complete installation – floor to ceiling, using a variety of materials to create a theater of effects permeating the stairwell and second-floor hallway of the Ocean View Branch Library in San Francisco. Color, image, and language are the elements that transform the library interior into an allegorical experience akin to being inside of a book. It is a bit of a perceptual puzzle. The flying and falling letters, stretched to the limits of comprehension, can be assembled (with some effort) into words, sentences and ultimately meaning. The textual intarsia of the hallway required over a thousand pieces of linoleum to create letters and shadows spelling out the line from the idiomatic folk tale, “ The sky is falling. A piece of it hit me on the head. Other literary quotes are embedded in the tile faience, and, in several languages, on the ground floor of the library.
Here is a video of the piece
Born in San Antonio Texas, Pratt is a graduate of the Pratt Institute. He moved to California and became a teacher at the California Academy of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
In 1973 he broke out on his own, he presently lives and works in Richmond, California.
The project was commissioned by the SF Arts Commission for $112,000.
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Beneath the trees there is a saying. “and where is the use of a book: thought Alice, without pictures or conversation”