Verso is a collaboration with artist Chuck Cave that we created for the 7th Artists’ Book Triennial Vilnius 2015. The theme of the Triennial, ‘Error,’ runs through our book from start to finish.  

We created the book’s imagery using methods that invited accident. Chuck created images by scanning the undersides of objects, and I shot photographs with a camera phone directed randomly upward. Each page spread features an image by each of us. I designed the layout so that our images move around the recto page surfaces, leaving the verso surfaces empty. Eventually the images begin to overlap and to expand across the gutter.  

For the text, we used a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “Mis Libros,” and subjected it to a process I’m calling a reverse mis-translation. In keeping with the theme of the exhibition and our method of creating images by scanning or photographing things from below, I translated the Borges poem in reverse order, from last line to first. I made intentional errors throughout the translation to give the resulting poem, “In the Book Mines,” a new sense.

Pictured here are page spread layouts from the book.

2014
12” x 9”
28 pp.
saddle-stitched
inkjet printing; each copy comes with a unique, altered ‘errata’ page
ed. of 10