| Title | Look, Don't Touch |
| Artist / Creator | Lise Melhorn-Boe |
| Artist's Nationality | Canada |
| Place of Publication | Kingston, ON |
| Publication Date | 2016 |
| Contributors | Based on a novel by Heliodorus |
| Process / Technique | Colour photocopying |
| Structure / Binding | Pop-up book |
| Medium / Materials | Fabric-covered board covers |
| Paper Stock | 100lb. acid-free card stock |
| Number of Pages | 14 page spreads |
| Dimensions (WxHxD) | 10.75 x 8.5 x 1.75 inches closed |
| Edition Size | Edition of 10 |
| Signed & Numbered | Signed and numbered edition |
Heliodorus wrote his convoluted adventure story, the Aithiopika, in 400 C.E. It takes place about 800 years earlier, in Kush (now northern Sudan/southern Egypt,) Egypt, and Greece. It's amazingly modern, with toy boys, and lots of lust, but there are storms at sea, pirates, bandits, and wars as well. I created the book as a commission for an exhibition, entitled Just One Look, at the University of Washington. The exhibition was curated to augment a conference on Classicism and Feminism. I really enjoyed the research-I learned a lot-and re-discovered the heart-stopping beauty of the drawings on Greek vases. Because the story has Greek, Kushite, Egyptian and Persian characters, I culled my cast of characters from the pages of art history. It was a challenge to distill an entire novel into 13 pop-up pages-telling the story with added commentary-it could easily be a TV mini-series—Sex in the Classical City, maybe, or a western set in the desert, with pirates, elephants and giraffes.
Artist Bio
Lise Melhorn-Boe has been making and exhibiting books and sculptural bookworks for thirty-five years. She studied at the University of Guelph and received her M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit. Melhorn-Boe has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States as well as Europe and South America. Her work is in several public and university collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery in Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Sudbury, The Timmins Museum Centre, the Art Gallery of Algoma, the Emma Ciotti Gallery (Iroquois Falls), the Art Gallery of Temiskaming (Haileybury), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), the Lake Galleries (Toronto) and the gallery at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Campus, as well as White Water Gallery and W.K.P. Kennedy Gallery in North Bay. Melhorn-Boe offers bookmaking workshops for adults and children.