For the past year Jesse Purcell and I have been working on a giant screenprinted book. What we ended up with is Capture the Flag.
A meditation far more than a statement, this massive (each page is 18″x24″), twenty page artist book starts with flags. Flags are paradoxically used as both markers of the internal cohesion of nation or tribe, and also as external proclamations of transformation and utopia. It is this tension that binds this book together. Beginning with my illustrations of flags stacking beneath, piling on, and wrapping around each other, these images become increasingly convoluted and unclear as the pages turn. For the tail end of the book, Jesse works his more playful imagery and textures into the fields of flags, meeting in a middle where all this imagery begins to conflict, contest, and even consume itself.
Books are available (only at an institutional rate right now) from Booklyn.
The book was recently featured as part of the 2016 Screenprint Biennial:
And was recently on display at Art Metropole in Toronto:
