Latin American modernism and avant-garde literature form the foundation of my on-going investigation into artist books from Latin America. The genre incites questions around production and appropriation, authorized voices, and the materiality of fine press and artists’ book production. Artists’ books, as disciplinarily uncomfortable objects, transgress the boundaries between artistic genres due to their multimedia fabrication incorporating sculptural, visual, textual, printed, and performative elements. This liminal status establishes new epistemological constellations across disciplines and challenges recalcitrant systems of ascribed significance employed to separate one genre from another.
The question is: What happens when there is a material change in the presentation of literature and visual art realigned in the elaboration of an artist book?
Consequently, my research hones how new constellations of meaning are constructed and recombined within the shifting and malleable format of the artist book.
Book artistry represents innovative critical concerns as well as interpretive relationships that necessitate examination of the artist book and a reexamination of the literary canon and visual works with which they interact. This intertwining is what constitutes the corpus of artist books as a field for investigation. In between the covers of artist books an interdisciplinary space emerges where literature and art intermingle.
