John Lehman's dissertation exhibition, In the Well of the Wind-Up Bird, displays visual critical readings of Haruki Murakami's novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Through an interdisciplinary blend of artmaking and scholarship, John's work physically intervenes in all 607 pages of the novel, exploring questions of translation, cultural transmission, the traumas of war, and the surprising implications of a missing housecat. At its core, this project seeks to demonstrate the imaginative labor, the interpretive art, that every reader and every reading performs in transforming dry ink on the page into literary experience.
John Lehman is an Interdisciplinary Doctoral candidate merging the fields of studio art and literary scholarship. He received an MFA from the SMFA, an MA in English from Middlebury's Bread Loaf School, and an MAT in teaching from Brandeis University. While teaching high school English, John was disappointed to see students assume they had little or no agency in their reading. Ever since, John has sought ways to show reading is a profoundly creative and productive act. His work aims to inspire a greater appreciation of the value brought by each reader and each reading and how that endless, imaginative mulitiplicity nourishes a growing citizenry of text. In the Well of the Wind-Up Bird hopes to expose reading as an artistic endeavor, as every reader exercises a sweeping franchise to interpret the words they read and build their own interpretive communities.
The exhibition is located in the Tisch Library lobby, Hirsh Reading Room, Tower Gallery and hallway leading to the Tower Café. John will lead a tour of the exhibition beginning at 5:15. All are welcome!
