Jim Sanborn

(American, b. 1945)
A Comma, A, 2003
Bronze, copper, LED light; 60 x 108 x 108 inches

Jim Sanborn is a multimedia artist working in such varied disciplines as photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Sanborn is well known for creating complex and unusual installations that act as reinterpretations of historic events or that call for participation in deciphering encrypted codes. He frequently works in the space where art and science intersect, combining the two in unlikely ways, and consistently exploring the relationships between science, antiquity, technology, and art. Sanborn’s work reflects his strong interest in the physical sciences, natural sciences, code-encrypted languages, and translations. He explains that his artmaking is propelled by “making the invisible visible.” The artist is notorious for employing highly unusual materials in his installations such as pulped CIA documents, petrified trees, shadows, lightening, artificially-aged sandstone, wave-machines, an Egyptian mummy, and original objects from scientific laboratories. 

Sanborn has created many public art installations located around the world, from sculpture gardens to museums to post offices and other government agencies. At the University of Houston, his work, A Comma, A (2003), is situated at the entrance of the M.D. Anderson Library, forming a natural conversation between the artwork and the library’s contents. The title of the work alludes to a grammatical mark—a simply drawn scratch on a page—that works as a symbol for a larger, more important function. A comma is that particular symbol placed within texts that enables the reader a short pause—a breath taken or perhaps a slight moment to gather thoughts. It indicates a fraction of a second where one thought and another meet on the page. It is a necessary pause where two separate ideas convene.

When viewed from above, Sanborn’s sculpture cleverly takes the shape of a comma itself. The curved steel structure contains cutout text arranged in rows that flow with the shape of the work. At night, internal illumination from electric bulbs radiate the texts onto the surrounding environment, creating a luminous atmosphere filled with large bright texts projected onto the library itself. In this atmosphere, the artwork and the library merge.

The text is derived from twenty-four excerpts from poems, novels, letters, legends, and oral histories around the globe, all found from literary works within the library itself. Each displayed in their native languages, the texts are written in Spanish, French, Arabic, Ethiopian, Greek, Chinese, Classical Latin, Native American Creek, Maori, Russian, and English. Upon reading the translations of each excerpt, a unifying theme is discovered. Sanborn digs deep into literary and historical classics to investigate relationships between women and men (that most undecipherable of languages) as understood and disclosed by some of the world’s most talented authors. Sanborn presents us with a tangle of women’s innermost voices (imagined and created through the author), their loves and desires, and visually projects them into the atmosphere. From ancient Sappho to contemporary Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sanborn displays women authors and subjects throughout history, as centered, strong, and visible.

A Comma, A is one of three artworks by Sanborn installed at UH at the same time. The two other corresponding works, that function as companion pieces, are found on the mezzanine level inside the library. An impressively large steel floor-to-ceiling scroll, Pliny’s Papyrus (2003), details the origins of papermaking excerpted from the Roman scholar Pliny in 77AD and extolls the brilliance of the Egyptian craft being born from their thirst for knowledge and education. Located directly behind the scroll is the mezzanine’s railing, titled Fragments of Fiction (2003). In the same style as the scroll, it performs the function of a railing—a structure of protection and security—and displays eight lines of text either written by women authors or focused upon women as subjects. Both artworks are backlit by the library’s large entrance windows, allowing the sun to effectively illuminate the cutout texts into legible lines of sun-writing. The three artworks function together as a whole, displaying Sanborn’s longstanding interest in language, translation, and literature. 

Sanborn received his BA degree from Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, specializing in art history and sociology followed by his MFA from Pratt Institute in New York City with a focus in sculpture. For nine years he maintained artist-in-residence stature at the arts center of Glen Echo Park in Maryland. Sanborn has created public sculptures for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Internal Revenue Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with many universities, arts institutions, and American embassies overseas. He has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibits both nationally and internationally. Sanborn published a book, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction (2004), concerning his artwork of the same title that was inspired by the Manhattan Project. 

Location

University of Houston
MD Anderson Library
Main entrance exterior

Text | Art Walk with Mike Guidry

Explore Randy Twaddle and Jim Sanborn with Mike Guidry as he talks about text in art.

Other Artworks by this Artist

Pliny's Papyrus, 2003

Fragments of Fiction, 2003