Artist's open book exhibit in Chicago prompts visitors to share deepest thoughts
CHICAGO (CBS) -- When it comes to sharing their deepest thoughts, not everyone is an open book, but sometimes all it takes is an open book. A mobile art installation at Columbia College prompts people to pour out their feelings.
Thoughts that once swirled in people's heads have been turned loose on paper.
"Everyone's thoughts and ideas have relevance, and they are significant," artist Regin Igloria said.
He's an artist who provides the prompt, "What keeps you up at night?" and a book of blank pages inside the Columbia College library.
"Most of my questions are very broad and general," he said. "They're really intended to create some kind of dialogue with the people that encounter them."
He calls the ongoing interactive art project "Everything on Wheels."
"The main component is a handmade book that I typically will make myself," he said.
Books and pedestals Regin crafted are part of his "Seven Skins" exhibition at the Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College.
The exhibition begins in the gallery, but the pedestals and the handbound books are on the move all over the Columbia College campus.
"I definitely like the idea of having a book as a physical outcome of this, and the idea of it being like just this cart that you can roll around and just put in different places with just like a small, little prompt. You don't even have to add that much. Just what keeps you up at night," Columbia College junior Harrison Kratz said.
Students on their way to class can free their thoughts.
"What keeps me up at night is a lot of times I'm just stuck in my own thoughts," Kratz said as he drew a sketch of himself in one of the Seven Skins books. "Adding like the visual element of just kind of me lying there in bed, just kind of staring at my ceiling, just in my own head."
Reading such personal pages can remind people how they're bound together.
"It's been great to see how revealing people are when given the chance," Igloria said.
Igloria started the Everything on Wheels project in 2012. He also hosts events where he teaches people how to make their own books.
His solo show at the Glass Curtain Gallery runs through April 26.