a-l-b-u-m: found, reconstructed, reassembled
Marcel Proust, in In Search of Lost Time, recollects his childhood and experiences into adulthood while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world. As sensuously recounted as it is, Proust’s novel narrates an intimate connection between the ‘present’ and the ‘past’, where the past time and memories leave their imprints upon our bodies, objects we used, places we stayed, as illustrated in Proust’s accounts of “involuntary memories.” Started with the writing of found poems — poems that are put together using words and phrases found in an existing work of writing — from Volume Six of Proust’s novel, I went on a discovery of memory fragments of my own. Limiting myself to things contained in one drawer of my childhood home, I decided to draw elements from ten selected old albums as the main thread stringing this artist’s book together. Other than an implicit overlap from a literal aspect of Proust’s words reassembled into mine, past and present perspectives meet and collapse onto the re-interacted photographs — a grown-up survey of myself subject to the camera frame. The underlying sequence of the images — animal abstractions, same object in and out of the frame, and a reappearing object across time — aims to reassemble the found fragments without overemphasizing the time-specific linearity.
Medium: The main structure of this artist’s book is hand-bound in drum-leaf style with 137 grams textured paper stock. The structure is designed to be opened and read from two sides: found poems on one side and manipulated photographs on the other. Each page is ink-jet printed in colors. An interactive structure that can be opened and collapsed in a dog flute shape is clipped to page six. The attached booklet (‘handkerchief’) inside spread six is hand-sewn in a three-hole pamphlet binding in 105 grams paper stock. Not encased with a distinguishable cover, the drum-leaf binding enabling each spread to open flat obscure the linearity of the book with increased cyclical suggestions.
Dimensions: 11.5 x 16 x 0.8 cm (main body) 12 x 12 cm (attached pamphlet, opened)
Editions: 1, 38 pages (printed and published by the artist)
2020