BODY OF WATER
CORPO DE AGUA

The ocean once divided the Old World from the New. Today, the different languages Man speaks maintain a similar communication divide. Man, as a being, lives all over the world, but physically looks and feels differently in the various regions where he lives. Similarly, one great ocean has a different composition of life forms, sand and salt that change according to the specific area. This artist's book relflects these separated parts, language divides, and bodies.

This book is a series of seven unbound plexiglass block "pages". The first and last pages are acquariums that seal-in Atlantic Ocean water and sand. The five interior pages are divided into three pages with drawings drilled into the plexiglass, featuring parts of a man's body: ear, hand and shoulders. Two pages contain a sonnet, written by the artist with inspiration from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and its translation into Portuguese.

Readers are encouraged to handle the title and end pages that are aquariums. Rocking the sand and water back and forth appropriately imitates ocean waves and induces a meditative state for personal reflection of the ocean and its relationship to the body.

Edition of 3, 2001
16" x 6" x 16" plexiglass, sand, ocean water from Maryland and Portugal
$2000

A LETTER TO LUNACY

A business letter addressed from me to Mr. Lunacy Moon pleads for him to stop corrupting computer print-outs, despite the reason that there may be a strong reason for this behavior: the moon is jealous of human technology’s ability to unlock the mystery of the cosmos.

Multiple copies of this letter, enclosed in the book, reveal a steady decay of text, margins and extraneous characters that eventually become complete gibberish and finally "flatline" into a dot matrix. This imploring letter and all of its degraded copies are handsomely bound in a book format, meant to be a gift to the moon.

Edition of 20, 1998
8 1/2" x 13 1/4" x 1/2" corkskin, Japanese bookbinding cloth, laser prints
$325

YOU TELL ME

This little, red book of Rorschach blots is made with red acrylic paint, layered over with Higgins ink washes in various shades of brown, depending on the edition, and graphite pencil on cream cardstock paper, bound in red bookbinding cloth with a small acrylic blot example set of the front cover. Each book is completely handmade and therefore unique, while based on a shared concept and technique.

You create the story as you turn the 44 pages and read from the blots, washes and stenciled shapes that are traced from paper-cuts made elsewhere in the book. It is a playful and psychological attempt to get you to create your own story from one artist’s improvisational visuals. Depending on your mood and who you are, the reading will change at every sitting. It’s the quintessential thousand-in-one book.

Go ahead and read-up! Don’t worry about your underlying personality structure. The artist won’t tell.

Edition of 11, 1998
4" x 4 1/2" x 1/2" acrylic, ink washes, graphite on cardstock paper
$200