Elizabeth Dove: Corpus Of The Unknowable

This intimate exhibition of nine works from the Corpus of the Unknowable series was created in 2004 by Elizabeth Dove, Associate Professor of Art at the University of Montana. Dove incorporates text into her graphic works as a way of exploring memory and knowledge. She states, “I have been cutting up a dictionary for several years now, letter by letter, and saving the definitions to use in artwork. Corpus of the Unknowable displays about a hundred of these cut-up definitions; each print holding text dust behind a skin-like surface. Selecting dictionary definitions and then cutting them up talks about a perpetual search for meaning, the patient digestion of enormous qualities of information in an effort to understand, the impossibility of stabilizing knowledge…”

The works that are made of collage, collagraph, and cut-up dictionaries will be featured in the Goldberg Family Library. They were accessioned into the MAM Collection through a generous gift from the artist. MAM is grateful that direct gifts to the museum’s collection from practicing artists which helps the MAM Collection grow.