I met Amy Bassin’s art, or rather danced around meeting it, for about 3 years. In that time, I caught glimmers of her work, sometimes too sharp for me to look at directly, heads covered in blue or lace dancing figures peeping from drapes, she made herself and work into a tableaux vivant of beheaded female bodies, moving in and out of her frames, a kind of hide and seek or unveilings.

What I saw of her art showed invisibility in silhouettes of a body and the shape of a head--appeared to me at battle with the pleasure of being invisible and with putting art in place of an artist’s visibility. When I first saw the work that we are publishing in this journal,  I was relieved, not because it is any less tough or rigorous, but because I could look without infringing on the privacy of a body wanting to be unseen. In the three series we include here, bodies are crawling through pages of books, reinhabiting them and taking them over, piece by piece.