PHOTOGRAPH
May 2006
7 x 8.75" / an edition of 20
BOOK: hand-sewn, multi-signature binding/ digitally printed, 167 pages, an edition of 20The content for this book was collected and formed over the duration of my MFA in Poetics at Mills College. As my thesis, it represents the culmination of my academic experience in typography and poetics. It consists of two prefatory essays, which attempt to contextualize the proceeding work as exercises in language, structure, and style, rather than poems or typographic arrangements. Following the essays, are seven Memoranda of such exercises, each with a different rhetoric and visual tone. The spreads are as deliberately designed as the individual pages: no page stands alone. For that reason, I submitted AUTOGRAPHOGRAPHY as a bound book, although the thesis parameters dictate 8.5 x 11" loose sheets, unbound, with specific margins maintained. For me, this was an unavoidable act of disobedience, as I insist that the book structure, as much as the pagination & individual page design, are inextricable from the presentation of the work. They are the work. In an age where the categorical nature of things has begun to deteriorate, rhetorically speaking, I find it important, if not entirely necessary, to pay attention to these categorical shifts, and perhaps, to aid in the shifting.
Excerpts from Autographography have appeared in Lamination Colony and Cricket Online Review: 1, 2, 3.