By Victor Barrenechea, Visual Arts Blogger

One of the advantages [NAME] art books have over the average art object is their ability for wide-spread dissemination (1,000 copies of each book printed) and their tactile nature. You can hold them in your hands, flip through the pages at your leisure. Much in the same way one used to appreciate music in the days of CD’s and albums, where the artwork and sleeve design was every bit as crucial as the music itself. Beatriz Monteavaro seems to have found a happy medium with her latest book Quiet Village, which includes a 30 minute long CD by her band Beings.

No, it’s not the first ever such CD/Book hybrid, nor is it hardly the first melding of audio and visual. But it is interesting what an object like this signifies for our times, when music is consumed as digital sound files, and art is confined to galleries, museums, and other institutions, if not pages in extremely limited-run art books, or digital blips on a computer screen.

The work was inspired and drawn while listening to the music, and both components together make for a complete experience. Each can be taken on their own, but without the music, it’s harder to take the drawings as seriously, not to mention that the music seems to waft aimlessly without the pictures to ground it.

As you flip through the pages, the book feels almost like a journal entry. Each image is intensely personal and intimate. It’s almost like finding someone’s personal sketchpad with all their art in it, at its best it feels as though you’ve just opened up a stranger’s diary. There’s everything from mixtape playlists to scrawled out to-do lists, and even random addresses written down alongside b-movie monster drawings so that the artist could remember where she might have needed to be that day. From reading this book, you really get a sense of having voyeuristically entered someone’s own personal world.