Mixed Media > Border Crossing: In the War Room

altered atlas, collage, thread, zipper
19 x 22 x 5 in.
2006

drawing, gouache, zippers, cut, book, bookwork, altered, alter, altered book, altered bookwork, bookwork, altered text, mapping, unique, one of a kind, cut paper, facebook, political art, paper sculpture, dissection,
Border Crossing: In the War Room

altered atlas, collage, thread, zipper
19 x 22 x 5 in.
2006
drawing, gouache, zippers, cut, book, bookwork, altered, alter, altered book, altered bookwork, bookwork, altered text, mapping, unique, one of a kind, cut paper, facebook, political art, paper sculpture, dissection,
Border Crossing: In the War Room

altered atlas, collage, thread, zipper
19 x 22 x 5 in.
2006
drawing, gouache, zippers, cut, book, bookwork, altered, alter, altered book, altered bookwork, bookwork, altered text, mapping, unique, one of a kind, cut paper, facebook, political art, paper sculpture, dissection,
Border Crossing: In the War Room

altered atlas, collage, thread, zipper
19 x 22 x 5 in.
2006

By cutting atlas pages in half and then stitching separator zippers onto the cut edges, it enabled me to reconstitute the atlas pages by zipping a portion of one map to the remnant of another in a analog version of “cutting” and “pasting.” These colorful folios with relief views of land formations and bodies of water with abstract markings can then be unfastened and refastened in a vast number of combinations, challenging our notions of geographical borders. They can also be viewed laid out on a plane or constructed as prisms and other shapes that transform the flat space into peaks and valleys, playing again on our concepts of geography. In this way, our notion of the codex, which traditionally has a fixed number of pages bound in a common spine, is expanded and becomes more versatile. A system using zippers is open; pages can be added, deleted, or interchanged at will.