 Family Tree By Julie Chen Berkeley, California: Flying Fish Press, 2013. Edition of 50. 9 x 9.25 x 2.625" cloth-covered drop spine clamshell box containing 16 two inch cubes. Digital prints on mulberry paper laminated onto maple wood blocks. Paper title illustration on lid. Julie Chen: "Family Tree is a piece about the idea of personal identity as framed by one's family history and family relationships. The piece consists of 16 wooden blocks with visual and written content on all 6 sides. When the blocks are placed in 4 rows of 4 blocks each, a continuous image with corresponding text is revealed. Each of the rows can be turned in order to reveal new content, or the blocks can be jumbled to allow the readers to create their own permutations of text and image." Created using Artist Book Ideation Cards for an Ideation show at the Abecedarian Gallery in the fall of 2013. Technique: unfamiliar Julie Chen: "I struggled with this draw at first mainly because of the 'no text' prompt that I originally got. In the end, I decide to exercise my option to throw one card back, and drew a new card from the text category. My original plan was to create a deck of cards, but as my ideas for the project progressed, I became more and more interested in the idea of random access of content that was afforded by creating something that was unbound. This eventually led me to the idea of creating a set of blocks so that each individual block in the set would have six possible sides of content that could be mixed and matched with the six possible sides of all the other blocks. The theme for the piece was based on work that I was already involved with on the theme of family history and personal identity. As is often the case with my process, my structure ideas turned out to inform my content ideas in unexpected, but meaningful ways." |