News Papers

News Papers
Oil-based ink and inkjet on newsprint, wood
24 x 36 inches
2015

News Papers is a series of artist books mounted on library rods that uses actual newsprint sheets from my archive that have been digitally printed with images and text from different sources – newspaper photographs and headlines, personal journals, poems, and song lyrics .  Each newspaper is loosely themed and developed around the particular marks found on the sheets, and each has a unique sense of authority, presence, and duration.

My archive of newsprint backing paper – over 2000 sheets – has been collected during the printing of many projects and images, and the sheets have been reused and recycled many times. The visual history and unintentional compositions on the newsprint are a historical record of my practice, an archive of the marginal and accidental, the unexalted and unremarkable. In this series, these marks are contrasted with more public remarkable events and shared histories including events such as wars, protests, and natural disasters. 

As a substrate, newsprint has traditionally carried this kind of shared, ephemeral information – it is naturally journalistic. I am capitalizing on the historical role of the print as journalistic image and reporter of current events. The work accentuates the relationship of news to newsprint, bridging time and technology through a contrast of printed marks.