Gunsmoke and Mirrors

Gunsmoke and Mirrors (2007-08)
Altered books, found materials
Open edition

global news fluxdigest

global news fluxdigest
Found materials, stamped metal type
Produced in an edition of 125 for the assembling-publication "None Of The Above" by Minnesota Center for Book Arts

global news fluxdigest (contents)

global news fluxdigest
Found materials, stamped metal type
Produced in an edition of 125 for the assembling-publication "None Of The Above" by Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Mystery of the Burning Ocean: A Power Boys Adventure

Altered book, installed view

Mystery of the Burning Ocean: A Power Boys Adventure

Original source book

• + Send a Postcard
• + Add to Collection
• + Share this work

Gunsmoke and Mirrors (2007-08)
Altered books, found materials

These Zane Grey westerns from the 1940s and '50s present a romanticized image of life in the American Wild West. My alterations create space for the other side of the story on topics including the treatment of Native Americans, the eradication of the American Bison, gender roles in the new West, and the pop culture legacies of The Cowboy, from the Marlboro Man to the Village People.

- - -

global news fluxdigest (2009)
Found materials, stamped metal type
Produced in an edition of 125 for the assembling-publication "None Of The Above" by Minnesota Center for Book Arts

A call to contribute to a Fluxus-inspired "assembling" project inspired this work. A dadaist version of an actual news digest or aggregator, this project is a random assembling of found materials. "Reading" the digest begins with a playing card from The Ungame, a mid-1970s board game which posed to its players open-ended philosophical questions like "How would you define joy?" or "What makes you cry?", intended to encourage family bonding and interpersonal communications. (It is hard in today's world to imagine such a game void of irony or sarcasm.)

To answer each question, I turned to the three great schools of philosophy and their modern-day media equivalents: ancient China (represented by a Chinese newspaper), ancient Greece (likewise represented by a Greek newspaper), and modern Western thought (represented by an American supermarket tabloid). Clippings from each of these sources are randomly combined and packaged into news digests. Whether the random snippets of news articles, sports coverage and advertisements offer any Confucian, Socratic or Freudian insight into the posed question depends entirely on the perspective of the viewer. (Well, their perspective, and their ability to translate Chinese and Greek.)

- - -

Mystery of the Burning Ocean (2007)
Altered book, aquarium, plastic tubing

Alterations to this book included waterproofing and connection to the aquarium's aerator, which caused bubbles to issue from the Power Boys' scuba gear on the book cover.

Book Artist

Context (2005-present)
Found (2002-2003)
Altered Books (2007-present)
Seven Deadly Sins (2000-2001)
Found: Cheerleaders Never Change
Found: Diarrhea
Spoken Word Storytelling: Feature-length productions
Screenprinting (2002-present)