Rob Kovitz, book artist, Winnipeg
EXCERPTS FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNDERWATER INVESTIGATIONS
(.pdf, 14 pages, 1.1 mb)
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Rob Kovitz creates bookworks and web projects that consist of texts and images he collects from various sources and recombines through a meticulous but highly subjective process of editing, ordering and juxtaposition, a kind of conceptual montage. Since 1992 he's published four bookworks, including Pig City Model Farm (Princeton Architectural Press) and Room Behavior (Insomniac Press), various short projects in magazines, and online projects at treyf.com.
A graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, he currently lives in Winnipeg.
EXCERPTS FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNDERWATER INVESTIGATIONS is merely a small sample of Rob's mammoth project, Ice Fishing in Gimli, a multi-volume image/text bookwork-in-progress. Set in an enigmatic town on a large, frozen lake in the middle of Manitoba, it’s an epic, quixotic saga of desire, ambition, weather and landscape; of drownings, freezings, murder and cannibalism; of alien architectures, bizarre conveyances, enigmatic soothsayers and esoteric ice-fishing techniques; of the search for enlightenment, the poignancy of fish-flies and the indeterminacy of maps; of Gimli-born Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stephanson and prairie writer and double-agent Frederick Philip Grove; of boredom, failure, madness, nothingness, unrequited love, best-laid plans, the Wandering Jew, the House of Squid and mysterious things that may or may not be hidden beneath flat, frozen surfaces, to name a few things.
Evocative, wry, enigmatic, disquieting—a densely built dream association in the guise of the meticulously documented and verifiable—six years in the making and still not finished—this is a book unlike any you’ve ever read before, with lots of pictures for when you get bored. So cast your hook and hold your breath—you never know what will get dragged up in Ice Fishing in Gimli.