Objects, associations, implications

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2002

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Abstract

Take an object, make an association, find its implication. Like a sieve that sorts data from large to small: I research, absorb, distill, make extractions, make connections, and utilize the image/text relationship to illuminate the resulting information. Juxtaposing appropriated visuals with literary quotation reveals, mediates, and/or creates storied spaces of meaning. These little books are the vessels that house the interstitial spaces in which personal memories and private experiences rub up against public institutions and mass media identities, and against the governmentalities that define, label, categorize, order and structure our lives. The books illuminate the personal and political, public and private. They do this by focusing on particular objects and then exploring their associations and implications in different social contexts with regard to the body and identity of the author and viewer alike. Like the manifestos of the avant-garde artists and designers of the Constructivist modern period that utilized the metaphor of illuminated manuscripts, my books act as textual polemical objects, diaries, memoir, non-fiction, poetry, taxonomies and textbooks -- they shed light on uncomfortable subjects, including a critical self-reflexivity toward personal experience. The books are manifestos that contain cultural criticism, question dominant paradigms, and are institutional indictments that call for an awareness from both the author and reader.

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