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Writer's pictureWestport Book Sale

Westport Book Shop Welcomes May Artist Deb Robicheau

The Westport Book Shop is pleased to welcome artist Deb Robicheau as guest exhibitor for the month of May 2022, at the Book Shop’s Drew Friedman Art Place.

Deb is a lifelong visual artist, sculptor, painter, writer, and screenwriter -- and devoted Thalassophile. At the Book Shop she is showing a group of sixteen sculptural mixed media boxes from her recent “Tiny Boxes” series.

About the series, Deb said that during the early days of the pandemic, she sought to make sense out of what we were all going through. As a way to create art during the weeks of lock down, Deb used what she had around the house to illustrate the collective experience.


“I began by facing our shared sense of mortality, exploring the impermanence of life on earth. I had a huge stash of old comic books from the 1930s through the 1980s and almost as many small boxes of varying dimensions. I had saved the comics for years, not because I liked comic books, but because I thought the art was interesting and like no other art I’d known. They were never meant to last, made of pulp and ink, but they had become monetarily valuable, so I saved them,” said Deb.

“Once the pandemic hit, a sense of permanence vanished and I thought, we’re losing so much as a species, I decided to sacrifice to the art and cut the comic books up, to illustrate that value could be transferred into what was important in the current world. The images and words were used to illustrate what we were going through in each of our sequestered spaces. We were all in the same storm, but not all in the same boat. We had the challenge to fit our joy and sorrows and love and loss and life and death into smaller and smaller spaces to try and stay safe. That’s what the boxes symbolize to me. Some frantic, some staid, some bland, some bizarre.”


You can see this exhibit at the Westport Book Shop, located at 23 Jesup Road, right across Jesup Green from the Westport Library. The art exhibit is open to the public during the Book Shop’s regular business hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10am to 6pm, and Sundays from Noon to 5pm (closed Mondays). Deb's art will be on display through May 31, 2022. All artwork on display is available for purchase.


The Book Shop’s “Drew Friedman Art Place” is an area of the store dedicated to exhibiting the work of community artists year-round, on a rotating basis. Miggs Burroughs, a Trustee of the Drew Friedman Community Arts Center, and a founding member of The Artists Collective of Westport, is curating the Book Shop's art exhibits, which change monthly.


More about Deb: While always keeping visual arts at the fore, the music industry has also featured in Deb’s professional life. She traveled the world as a tour manager for several bands and solo acts. Deb currently serves as producer on the upcoming musical feature film Out of My Comfort Zone, an anti-bullying coming-of-age independent film for teens. Deb is a proud alumnus of California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles. You can follow Deb on instagram at: @debrobicheau


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