Doug Beube: Wash is a collection of specially crafted large soap bars etched with racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual slurs or epithets that offer participants the opportunity to eliminate or wash away words that vilify "the other". Participants are invited to select a bar of soap from a wall of carefully arrayed ceramic soap dishes and to wash their hands with it, letting the ink flow from the letters and mix with the white suds and lather. The work explores what it is to be the object of ethnic, religious, sexist or homophobic insults, asking what it might take to cleanse disdainful speech from the collective consciousness.


The Biblioclast: Introduction

Through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, paper, photography, and sculpture, my work explores the book itself, a seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in a digital age. I apply quasi-software functions such as cutting, pasting and hypertext onto an analog system; it does not work it cannot. The codex is intractable as a technology; restricted from interacting with it by not altering its inevitable course, you read linearly from beginning to end. It is essentially inflexible. That is its built-in personality flaw; that is its elegance.


Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex is a monograph about the artist's work, with several essays by critics, curators and writers.

Masked Wisdom & Masked Erudition
Altered Dictionary
19 x 17 x 8 inches
2016