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# A Library Haunted by Hologram Books
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/a-library-haunted-by-hologram-books/
- Published: 2016-12-12T22:19:14.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:13:18.000Z
- Description: Wenyon & Gamble's "Bibliomancy" is a hologram library of ghostly books that conjures the past while considering the future of the printed word.
- Author: Allison Meier
- Tags: Art, holograms, Magnan Metz Gallery, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/12/bibliomancy06.jpg)

Installation view of Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place at Magnan Metz Gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

A shelf of 54 books glows in Magnan Metz Gallery, their weathered spines illuminating titles like *Wonders of the Invisible World* and *The Absolute Weapon*. On approaching this otherworldly library to examine a volume closer, it’s revealed that the books are all holograms, their covers receding into darkness.

[*Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place*](http://www.magnanmetz.com/exhibitions/wenyon-gamble-out-of-place?ref=hyperallergic.com)*,* now on view at the Chelsea gallery, is the first New York showing of “Bibliomancy.” The installation by [Wenyon & Gamble](https://wengam.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) (the duo of Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon) debuted in 1998 at the [Boston Athenaeum](http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com), with the books sourced from that institution’s collections. Although it’s now almost 20 years old, titles such as *Europe, Going, Going, Gone!* and *The Strange Career of Jim Crow* are reminders of how history always haunts the present.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/12/bibliomancy03.jpg)

Installation view of Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place at Magnan Metz Gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) tk

For this iteration, the walls painted a contrasting blue as they were[ in 1998](http://www.magnanmetz.com/attachment/en/531783b815a837e36b784de9/Press/5384d8688bdb509f4ec7326a?ref=hyperallergic.com), the artists have surrounded “Bibliomancy” with other uncanny specters of the past. Card catalogue drawers with their found poetry categories — “League of Nations to Leather Jacket,” “Dolly to Domestic Dilemmas” — hover in sepia-tinged holograms, while chunks of coal glisten in others. In the second room, a teapot is confronted with an eerie phantom of antique silverware, projected in elusive three dimensions.

Wenyon & Gamble regularly use holography to ruminate on outdated technology. Their 2012 exhibition at Magnan Metz — [*A Universe held up for Inspection*](http://hyperallergic.com/50339/micheal-wenyon-susan-gamble-magnanmetz-gallery/) (reviewed [in Hyperallergic by Ellen Pearlman](http://hyperallergic.com/50339/micheal-wenyon-susan-gamble-magnanmetz-gallery/)) — explored the legacy of the analogue photograph. For instance, holograms of wooden glass plate storage boxes. It’s interesting that Wenyon & Gamble continue to emphasize that holography, in a way, has more in common with 19th-century photography than that of the 21st century. Daguerreotypes in *Out of Place* have a similar hands-on process to the holograms, which are animated with 3D images captured through lasers and emulsion on glass.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/12/bibliomancy01.jpg)

Installation view of Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place at Magnan Metz Gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Norman Bryson in his 1998 [catalogue essay](http://wengam.com/essays%5Fshortlist/bryson/bryson.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) for “Bibliomancy” writes that there “is something about holography that is essentially untimely; it was born too late, or too soon; in a sense its time has never come.” Holography emerged in the 1960s as an artistic platform, yet it’s mostly been regarded as kitsch, more likely to be seen as a science museum novelty than in fine art institutions.

That lack of a certain time also gives holography a strength. The titles of the “Bibliomancy” tomes are often references to a lost past, whether *Pursuing the Whale* or the incredibly slim *San Francisco Social Register*. The word “bibliomancy,” meanwhile, refers to a divination practice of opening a book to a page and conjuring meaning from a passage. Together, these elements invite the viewer to find their own resonance in these disparate volumes, and consider what a book means as a physical object in our increasingly digital future.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/12/bibliomancy04.jpg)

Installation view of Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place at Magnan Metz Gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/12/bibliomancy07.jpg)

Installation view of Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place at Magnan Metz Gallery (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

[Wenyon & Gamble: Out of Place](http://www.magnanmetz.com/exhibitions/wenyon-gamble-out-of-place?ref=hyperallergic.com) *continues at Magnan Metz Gallery (521 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through December 17\.*