I guess this is what I'm doing. My shoulders hurt and I want my momma.

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The final project I’m proposing is a collection of three artists books assembled within an artist’s box that showcases their related theme—montage. Each of these books is a slightly different look at the relationship of landscape to memory and community, and each uses a different combination of text and image.

The following is a more full description of each component of the project:

Accordion Book - The small accordion book is a limited exploration of the idea of inside-outside, and uses several images of a “mermaid’s purse” taken from both a scan and a photograph of a mermaid’s purse, which is the fibrous ‘egg’ that sharks, skates and rays are born from. I have taken the images of the purse and overlaid them with three different landscapes that would perhaps be visible during the passage of the purse through the water and to the shore. A few words begin the very small book, which is already completed.

Artist’s Box - The box that will house the three books is nearly complete, and is a traditional book-box with the inner-trays papered with a collection of collaged, painted, and glossed newspaper. The outer box uses newspaper overprinted with a Photoshopped image of “Devil’s Club,” a spiny plant, taken from an Alaskan photograph. The interior boxes are painted in an experiment with the serendipity of using taken-text and blocking or marking-out portions to leave only a few words and images relating to the overall project.

Never-Ending Book – The never-ending book utilizes a form of folding and gluing a single 8.5” x 11” sheet of card-stock, with two-sided printing, so that it can be rotated to create a ‘book’ that has no apparent beginning or end. The different configurations that come about through the folding allow for a use of language and image that disrupts traditional notions of linear narrative.

I have an older draft of this book, but will completely revise it using Illustrator rather than Photoshop for the text. One side, the more static side, will be printed with pictures of topographical maps, while the more mobile side will display text contemplating topography and memory.

Main Book - The main book is an in-process work and will be longer than the other two pieces. It will primarily be text although will use various images throughout the layout.

The text itself is a small collection of short fiction stories heading towards a larger collection, perhaps a novel, in the future. The stories are based loosely around three main protagonists and a number of secondary characters, all of whom have a tentative connection due to location, and how they are perceived and narrated through the different voices of the protagonists. The main settings are Chicago, a small city in Washington, and an isolated Alaskan bay.

Most of the images (diagrams, photographs, made-postcards, and Photoshopped images) that will be used in this version of the book have already been collected. Image plays a large part in the book as it highlights and suggests different relationships between vision and interpretation, as well as how the whole can only be assembled through the superimposition of multiple layers.

I perceive this book, which is tentatively titled Montage & Bound, as an experiment in putting together an incomplete body of works in order to get a sense of where the stories may go in the future. In other words, the book will not be finished, although it will be designed in InDesign, printed on 11” x 17” newsprint at the Service Bureau, trimmed to 5” x 7.5”, and bound by myself using perfect binding.

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Overall, I have a sense of this project as just beginning my larger experiment in gathering divergent materials and creating a fictional meta-narrative that only loosely holds the individual components together in what I perceive to be a continuously shifting set of contexts. I tend to write from extremely subjective positions, varying narrative voice frequently in order to create brief flashes, or glimpses, into the psyche of different characters who are searching for new paths, stories and ways of perceiving themselves in relation to the multitudes of voices they come in contact with. This project is a way for me to explore this mode of writing in various media.