[36 Plays On A PAGE]
By Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Published by Fun Fog Press
A novel novel.
A diary.
A high-flying history.
Utopia Myopia is an academic adult comic book with visions of utopia, dystopia & myopia. Illusions, confusions & conclusions play out over 36 plays. The setting for each play is a piece of paper 81/2”x11”. Characters are listed. Scenes & characters are drawn on the top half of the page, while five columns of type in a newspaper style are set below. The dialogue is kept minimal. A shorthand determined by the number of letterforms per line. Utopia Myopia is a text-message for today's limited attentions spans. A work of art in its own right.
"Apple trees & bobby pins debate things. A CNN app lets Anderson Cooper interview Wittgenstein on Cloud 9, a proud cloud explains letterforms, god DOG & work. WHY discourse, of course & Giotto ANGELS are finally free to possess legs and high-heels in their City of Angeles palm trees. Disagree re. architectural theory, but agree with the glitzy glass lady-shaped high-rise spanning Sunset Boulevard, that heaven is achieved in Utopia Made in Hollywood."
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is a San Francisco-based artist, graphic and landscape designer, and writer. Born in 1928, Solomon first worked as a dancer before studying painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. After the death of her husband in 1956, Solomon moved to Basel, Switzerland to study graphic design at the Basel Art Institute with Armin Hoffman. She later studied Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
Best known for her interior Supergraphics of the 1960s Sea Ranch and her 1991 Ribbon of Light installation at the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco, her iconic style of mixing Swiss Modernism and West Coast Pop, pioneered the look of the California Cool - an important moment in graphic design history.
Her works have been exhibited in galleries around the world from Paris to New York, and is currently on permanent exhibition at SFMOMA. Now in her 90s and still working on her craft, Barbara has turned her attention to a smaller canvas, creating pieces that tell not just one story, but many, and make a single page dance well beyond its borders.
