Foreign Familiar

2007, open book, sculptural works, ashes, digital photos, DVD projection, 25’ x 30’, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD 2007

I am concerned with materials - not the way they look but the way they are. FORETASTE: Foreign/Familiar is a play of opposing traditions,that of materials hand printed and that of materials electronically conceived and produced. Both traditions allow in their stages of development, an opportunity for narrative inclusion, by recording human experience through the meaning of transferred visual language, considering the complexity of resources and interrelationships that exist in the 20th century aesthetics of hypermedia synthesis.

Trusting the gathering of accumulated pages, I am creating a record of personal dimensions that demonstrate the relation of shared, borrowed and processed cultural experience within the codes of visual and verbal form. I am currently working on several new artists books that investigate the process and product of bookmaking itself, namely the book as alternative space; the book as a different kind of reading experience; and the book as an object of potent disclosure. Examples of the latter are entitled: FORETASTE: Foreign/ Familiar and its companion MELTING MEDIA: Sensation / Cessation.

In FORETASTE: Foreign/Familiar, a large sculpture with two walls held by large columns and printed on both sides is planned to extend our suspended states of being and anticipation of disaster. The book will be an extended experience of this theme.

For those of us that have come to hand bookmaking from printmaking, we agree that there is a poetics of retrieval. Taking impressions, we make prints. It is a heightened activity that provides new embodiment. “Displacement” is the trademark of printmaking. We create controlled accidents. The print is also a portable muse with a type of aesthetic “aura”. Evolution of techniques bring new imagery and ideas – does the aura follow along if the hand is abreast from the making?

FORETASTE will throw up several questions regarding the life of images and the debris we are leaving behind in the 21st century.

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death: every coming together a foretaste of …” — Arthur Schopenhauer

View artist book Foreign Familiar in detail.