Restless Dust. by Wight, Gail - 2009.

San Francisco, California:: San Francisco Center for the Book,, 2009.. Edition of 50. 7.75 x 9.75 x 3.5" custom wooden box containing one book, two paper birds, velvet, and electronics. Book: 6.5 x 8.25", 36 pages. Linocut and pigment prints. Handset in Cheltentam Old Style. Printed on Rives heavyweight paper. Letterpress printed on a Vandercook press. Sewn binding in leather wrapper with leather tie closure. Gail Wight: "'Restless Dust' is a multimedia work housed in a two-tiered wooden box. The top portion holds a letterpress leather-bound artist's book separated by Plexiglas from a velvet-lined chamber containing two illuminated paper birds (activated when the box lid is opened). The text invites Charles Darwin's ghost to sail to present day San Francisco and wander with me through the greater Bay Area. The focus of the journey is three-fold: to celebrate Northern California's unique species; to examine Darwin's legacy and its impact on the Bay Area; and to acknowledge the fragile and endangered state of local flora and fauna, beleaguered by environmental degradation during Darwin's time and my own. The book was created while in residence with the Imprint at the San Francisco Center for the Book. "The title is a remix of a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft: 'It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.'" Anita Mohan, "Embodying Experience: A Conversation with Artist Gail Wight" (May 24, 2011): "Wight's medium tends to be experimental media, I first became acquainted with her through her playful, more traditional artist's book, 'Restless Dust'. … The book was the direct result of Wight's residency at the San Francisco Center for the Book … She had never made a book before - as with the rest of her work, the depth of her curiosity drove her to learn how. "'Restless Dust' takes as a point of departure an invitation to Darwin: What would you show Darwin if he visited the Bay Area? The idea came to Wight as she was driving around, listening to Otis Redding's '(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay' - I want to meet Darwin at the bay and walk around with him. Uncertain of what to write, Wight sent an email to 30 artists, scientists or theorists of some kind, who shared an interest in Darwin, asking them, 'If you could show Darwin one thing around the Bay Area - what would you show him?' "The resulting book was a conversation between art and science, full of allusions and wordplay that looks at our culture and our endangered environment. At one point, for example, Wight plays with the double meaning of The Red Queen Effect. In Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking-Glass', the Red Queen said, 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.' A biologist coined the term 'The Red Queen Effect' from Carroll's book to describe the need for any species to continue evolving in order to keep control of its space and keep up with the system within which it is striving to survive. The same sort of linguistic and visual whimsy occurs in asking how Darwin would solve the local problem of an invasive species of crabs that flow into the Bay Area and decimate local species. In a poetic turn, she writes that they would be pushed to sea in eucalyptus canoes; eucalyptus is also an invasive non-native species that crowds out native species, even killing local foraging birds with a suffocating tar-like substance.