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.

Empire (2010)

Two years later, when I was invited to do a show at JB Jurve, I used the slicing technique to create some large photomontages and this time created a floor piece based on the text of Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “Of Sprinkling in the Garden,” which he had written while in temporary exile in Santa Monica.

OF SPRINKLING THE GARDEN
O sprinkling the garden, to enliven the green!
Watering the thirsty trees. Give them more than enough
And do not forget the shrubs
Even those without berries, the exhausted
Niggardly ones. And do not neglect
The weeds growing between the flowers, they too
Are thirsty. Nor water only
The fresh grass or only the scorched.
Even the naked soil you must refresh.

This is how the text looked when enlarged and segmented into 180 letter-size inkjet prints placed on the floor of the gallery.

This is what it looked like after visitors to the show had trampled and dispersed it.

To accompany the exhibition, I produced an artist’s book that spread the text across some 200 pages. As the blurb accompanying the book noted, “Dispersion enacts the “sprinkling” that is Brecht’s metaphor for egalitarian distribution in the nine-line poem “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” as a dispersal of the text of the poem itself. ” This is a page from the book.

A limited number of signed and numbered copies are available. Please contact me if you’re interested.

Hard copy available from Amazon.

The PDF version is available in the Store.

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