Artist Books
2000 - 2006
I became interested in cut-ups as a method of writing after making some postcards this way. My books are an alternative to the totally informal and abstract Dadaist background of word collage. Creating a narrative from random words held certain formal constraints that were appealing to me. I started with an anonymous 1940's photo album from Denmark and a copy of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Expedition. This project became " Reassigned Identities ".
In further books the text came from reviews of art exhibitions printed in magazines.
I cut out single letters and punctuation marks up to groups of two or three words. The various subjects are augmented by persistent references to elements seen in other photographs I also collected while living in Scandinavia. Some of these were passport photographs that formed the basis of " History on Holiday " which was commissioned by BlackFlash Magazine and occupied the lower two inches of the issue from cover to cover. It was perforated so one could separate it the magazine. The shape was based on souvenir booklets one could purchase at tourist destinations in the early twentieth century. The text is imagined quotations of those pictured talking about the past.
The work " Seen " is created by gluing phrases into an existing post-war photo album from Germany. My criteria was that the album's photographs remain as they were originally placed while I positioned text around them and continued the narrative on blank pages in between.