Special Collections has copy number 30/115, signed by the artist. IaU Title from colophon. Limited edition of 115 copies. Artist's description: "Acheiropoetica (which means not made by hands in Greek) are a class of Christian icons that are supposed to have come into being miraculously. Many Acheiropoetica are textiles that purport to show the trace left when divinity comes into contact with cloth. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, their authority is unquestioned. The Shroud of Turin, the Veil of Veronica, and the Mandylion are all examples of images formed through physical contact with Jesus. Religious claims aside, the idea that Acheiropoetica are examples of unmediated images-images that are formed without any human intervention-is intriguing. Photographs and mirrors used to offer images that were assumed to be unmediated, images that had authority, but photography began to lose its role as trusted reporter very early in its history, and today's digital editing techniques have made it clearly subject to authorial intervention. For a while, daguerreotypes did retain a certain veracity. Each one was unique, a particular record of a precise moment, a chemical rendering of an optical condition. Add to that the fact that they were made on highly polished silver plates-mirrorlike-made them seem as truthful as a mirror. Even as they were seen as authoritative, mirrors have always been suspect-tools of the devil, windows into evil-but they are still trusted by many as a way to examine one's own face. However, the lateral translation of a reflection and the distortion of the glass and reflective coating make it as unreliable as an oil painting. Think about how odd your own face looks to you when you see it in a photograph as opposed to how it looks in your bathroom mirror. The loss of meaning and trust in images has been a gradual descent into a world of immersive media, where meaning is a process rather than a destination. As artifacts of human contrivance, photographs now lack all authority, semblance of truthfulness, or unquestioned meaning; they seem contingent, lacking any center or substance. In fact, most photographs today have no physical existence at all. I am interested in how images might be made to seem unmediated, how they might be made to revert to a kind of solidity. In a very literal way, I wanted to create a material metaphor to elaborate the idea of an acheiropoieton- where the lithographic shadows of the cloth images were multiplied into a book. But there is a problem inherent in cotton cloth: Cotton production has a long and horrible history. Sven Beckert's great book, Empire of Cotton, details not only the development of chattel slavery in the New World in response to the growing demand of the textile mills in England, but also the troubling history of cotton in the Old World. Cotton cloth-comfortable, easily dyed, beautiful-comes with a long, miserable history of human suffering and exploitation." -- Taken from Vamp and Tramp's website. Includes accompaning text titled "Concering Acheiropoita or Not made by hands" (32 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 21 cm). "Produced during a residency at the Borowsky Center at the Univeristy of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvia in association with the MFA Book Arts & Printmaking Program and Director Cynthia Nourse Thompson. Project assistance included master printer Amanda D'Amico and graduate assistant Matao Dreskin"--Colophon. "This project is printed entirely from dye sublimation cotton cloth positives -- the printing plates are self-screening shadows of those textile separations, and the resulting plates were printed on a Heidelberg KORS one color at a time" --Colophon. "A Studio of Exhaustion project"--Colophon.
Summary:
Artist's statement: Acheiropoetica is a book of experimentally printed offset-lithographed images that offers a visual discursion on themes of miraculous images, chattel slavery, cotton cloth production, the invention of photography, and the political nature of all images. A satellite book, Concerning Acheiropoetica, is a small book that discursively considers the images in Acheiropoetica.
OCLC:
(OCoLC)1232930586
Locations:
OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.