See Section
Published: 2024
8.5″ x 11″
52 pages
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See Section is is an alphabetically sectioned “X-ray” view of the interior of an illustrated dictionary. It was generated by scanning the pages of a dictionary, removing all the text and leaving in place the illustrations, which aggregate into 24 readymade montages.
Index
Published: 2017
6 x 9″ (20.955 x 15.24 cm)
202 pages
Index is an archive of graphite drawings deposited on 8×5″ index cards.
A limited number of signed and numbered copies are available. Please contact me if you’re interested.
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Textile
Published: 2016
8.5″ x 8.5″ (21.59 x 21.59 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
202 pages
Three-tone patterns generated by a palimpsest of digital layers containing the words TEXT and TEXTILE. The book assembles a hundred variations.
Text and textile are both related to the Latin verb texere, “to weave.” The underpinning concept of the book is to turn text back into textile. My interest in weaving as a metaphor that unites the visual with the textual goes at least as far back as the Abrash paintings. In this case, I also had in mind Henrich Heine’s poem “The Silesian Weavers,” in which weaving becomes the weaving of a curse on the those who impoverished the weavers and suppressed their revolt.
A limited number of signed and numbered copies are available. Please contact me if you’re interested.
Buy from Amazon. In New York City, Textile is stocked at Printed Matter.
Country
Published: 2016
8.25″ x 8.25″ (20.955 x 20.955 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
202 pages
Referencing painting’s historical fondness for skin, Country features 100 digitally painted monochromes layered over bit-mapped pornographic images. Each monochrome is color-matched to a skin tone sampled from the underlying image. The result is a reconsideration of the fleshiness of painting in the digital age as well as a catalog of the range of colors that can pass for skin tones in the pornographic frame.
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Herd
Published: 2013, 2016 (revised edition)
8.25″ x 6″ (20.955 x 15.24 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
130 pages
The second and definitive edition of Herd appeared in 2016 with this terse description on the back cover: “A series of photo-word hybrids that inventories and destabilizes the ideological constructions of words and images in mass circulation.”
On each page of this 130-page book, a word serves as a frame for an image. As in the artist books that preceded Herd, the fusion of words and images is an alienating device, used to coax from both words and images something beyond their conventionalized meaning.
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Crush
Published: 2016
8.25″ x 8.25″ (20.955 x 20.955 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
202 pages
In the early 2000s, before the introduction of the smartphone, personal digital assistants (PDAs) were widespread. I had a Palm Vx, which had a monochrome screen and on which I installed a graphic app called TealPaint. By today’s standards, the capabilities of the version of TealPaint I had were primitive but i found the constraints of the software and the tiny drawing surface of the Vx ideal for developing intense and extended concentration. My procedure was to draw and erase over and over until something emerged on the screen that was both unexpected and in some way satisfying. I did this for two or three years and accumulated something like 300 of these digital drawings.
In 2016, I collected a hundred of these mini drawings in a book I called Crush, a reference to both what inspired the drawing on the cover and the form factor of the Palm device. The drawings are reproduced at original scale against a tinted background matching the color of the Palm Vx screen.
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through
Published: 2013, 2016 (revised)
8.25″ x 6″ (20.955 x 15.24 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
198 pages
Bertolt Brecht’s 1922 poem “Of Poor B.B.” (Von Armen B.B.), written on a night-train ride between Munich and Berlin by a poet in his mid-twenties, is a human bedbug’s vision of a fallen world awaiting purgative annihilation.
In through, I articulated the four verses of the eight stanza, letter by letter, across 183 pages, turning the boundaries of each letter into the frame of an image. The images were generated by keywords lifted from a dream journal and plugged into Google’s image search. The mating of letter and image frames and alienates details that in isolation acquire an intensity that surpasses that of their mundane sources. Complex correspondences and collisions between individual letters and images and between words and image sequences emerge.
Complementing this reconstruction of Brecht’s text, a collection of five oneiric vignettes, titled “The Permeable City,” add to Brecht’s particular use of the image of urban desolation to suggest nihilistic indifference (je-m’en-foutisme), the possibility of similar imagery functioning in dreams as metaphor for the psychoanalytic demolition of the ego’s (mis)identifications.
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Dispersion
Published: 2012
8.25″ x 6″ (20.955 x 15.24 cm)
Black and white on white paper
200 pages
Dispersion harks back to an idea employed in one of the pieces I included in my Art Center thesis show. At that time I was producing large photographic prints using an ordinary inkjet printer by digitally slicing images in Photoshop, outputting each slice as an individual print, then taping the slices together using packing tape. In the floor-sited Empire, which was an enlargement of an Apollo astronaut’s boot imprint on the surface of the moon, I dispensed with the taping and abutted the prints on the floor, where visitors where encouraged to step on them and move them around.
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Civil War
Published: 2011
10″ x 8″ (25 x 20 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
24 pages
Bertolt Brecht’s poetry inspired three of my artist books: Dispersion, Civil War, and through.
Civil War is based on Brecht’s 1943 poem, “The Active Discontented.” On each page a line from the poem is each overlaid over a transparent photomontage.
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