Objects • Associations • Implications
[Generators • Stories • Meaning]
MFA Design Thesis Exhibition
The University of Texas
Austin, Texas
2002
Books can be 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.
These books illustrate and 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 period that utilized the metaphor of illuminated manuscripts, these books act as polemical objects, diaries, fiction, memoir, non-fiction, poetry, taxonomies and textbooks -- they utilize poetic license and the image/text relationship to shed light on subjects, including a critical self-reflexivity toward personal experience of self and others. The books can be viewed through the lens of art books, manifestos, or polemical objects that contain cultural criticism, question dominant paradigms, and are institutional indictments that call for an awareness from both the author and reader.
Reading Room: Illumninating Manuscripts
Enclosed interior space within the gallery, with twenty niches for twenty small books.
All books digitally printed on Tetenal Spectra Jet Duo Matte, are double-fan French folded and perfect bound, all measure 3.5” x 3.5”.
