The Sign of the Owl

Last November I had the honor of judging the JAB-sponsored Critic’s Award for the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair. Artists’ books take such a wide variety of interesting forms, I ended up giving two awards, one to  Anatomy of Insanity by Maureen Cummins and one to Karaoke by Masumi Shibata. The former is a visual interpretation [...]

We left off our discussion of absence with Stalin’s revisionist approach to history and the question of whether or not he succeeded in erasing the past through willful obliteration.
This leads me to our last book which is about different kind of historical absence, one not imposed by a political agenda and layers of ink, but [...]

In the last post we explored a book which centered around the personal experience of absence. Following is the continuation of the transcription of my CBAA presentation, Figuring Absence, in which I now explore the political experience of absence.
I’d like to turn now to a very different kind of absence. Ken Campbell and David King’s [...]

We left off the last post with the idea that belonging is a core part of our experiences of absence. Following is the continuation of the transcription of my CBAA presentation, Figuring Absence.
So let us now turn to Sophie Calle’s book Exquisite Pain which takes up both of this idea of absence as it relates [...]