Julia Haft-Candell: The Infinite Library

The Infinite Library presents the multidimensional work of Los Angeles-based artist Julia Haft-Candell, comprising ceramic and bronze sculptures, drawings and paintings, animations and installation. Ever evolving, The Infinite is an alternative world referencing ancient structures of communication that seeks to produce forms of knowledge unconstrained by conventional systems or classifications. This framework has its own values, code of ethics, and visual language, which is documented in The Infinite: Glossary of Terms and Symbols.

Comprising four parts, the first component of The Infinite Library manifests as a formal display of Haft-Candell’s ceramic work, which include hands interlocking with motifs of knots, chains, and infinity symbols carved onto their surface and presented on a large-scale stepped platform. These works articulate her evolving Glossary, which is further explored in the second element of the show in image and text-based drawings and a stop-motion animation. The third aspect comprises an archive documenting the history, philosophy, and work of The Infinite School, the experimental art school that she runs from her studio that challenges conventional institutional practices and pedagogies. The final element, which the exhibition’s title references, manifests as an alternative library with shelving that doubles as seating stocked with books selected by over seventy artists. Channeling the generative ethos of The Infinite, the library, which functions as a as a respite for collective and solitary contemplation, will host divination readings as well as discussions on art, speculative fiction, and craft throughout the exhibition.

Included in the library are two central texts inspirational to Haft-Candell’s thinking—Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptical novel The Parable of the Sower (1993) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s visionary essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). In Butler’s future, dramatically impacted by climate change, the protagonist goes in search of Earthseed, a religion whose God shape-shifts through individual worship. While Butler reimagines the future, Le Guin reinterprets the human origin story by replacing the spear as the first tool with a carrier bag—for gathering and distributing food, objects, and stories for sharing—attributing community building as foundational rather than singular (heroic) aggression. In privileging storytelling as a creative force, Le Guin reminds us, as Donna Haraway has remarked, that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with,”^[1] values embedded in Haft-Candell’s exhibition, The Infinite Library

The Infinite Library is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director, de Saisset Museum. The exhibition originated at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Pitzer College (September – December 2023) and has been expanded at the de Saisset.

^[1] Donna Haraway, “Introduction,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota, 2019), 10.