The Box, 2022
Artist book, Johannot fine art paper, handcrafted Cave paper cover, inkjet digital print photographs, letterpress print.
8 ½ x 10 ½ inches
The Box, 2022
Artist book, Johannot fine art paper, handcrafted Cave paper cover, inkjet digital print photographs, letterpress print.
8 ½ x 10 ½ inches
The Box is an artist book that takes up my grandfather’s photographs from the 1930s and 40s, an idyllic moment in family life before my uncle died in the war and my grandmother died shortly after. These tragedies happened decades before I was born, yet from the time I was a child, I felt the presence of something else, some unexplained absent cause that motivated my father’s joy and creativity along with his unpredictable outbursts of anger and violence. Influenced by Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” I freely use my own recollections and the recollections of others to try to get at some kind of idea or truth. Not a truth as in "what really happened" or even "how did my father feel," but rather, a truth that comes out of my own imaginative engagement with the visual language offered up by the photographs themselves, the possibilities of narrative, and the strategies of contemporary photography and conceptual art. My truth in the book emerged in a nonlinear, complicated process of editing photos, choosing, eliminating, sequencing, using trial and error. A "truth" gradually came to me. Or maybe I could call this an idea. Or maybe in literary terms, we would call this the "theme" of the book. I think the book is trying to show that our daily life, innocent as it appears to us, is permeated with the traces of buried trauma, colonialist and imperialist violence, and many of us largely go about our lives completely oblivious to this reality. But this violence will erupt at the most unexpected moments and create a rupture in the fabric of our lives, and when that happens, we grieve and try to explain. And then we try to go back to the way life was before.