Alphabet Tricks Structure is accordion-like with 15 double sided pocket pages. The text was hand-set in Weiss Roman, Weiss Italic, and wooden type and letterpress printed on Stonehenge paper. The images were silk-screened at the Women's Studio Workshop on Kozo paper. The slip cases were silk-screened by Thomas Wojak at W.O.R.K.S. and constructed by John DeMerritt. Diane Jacobs set and printed the text, created the artwork and constructed the books. Alphabet Tricks situates itself and women in that ambivalent space between a word's connotation and denotation, revealing society's contradiction between desire for and condemnation of feminine sexuality. The book unfurls accordion-like; each panel is home to a word and its corresponding definitions. The definitions are complex creations, hovering between the so-called neutrality of the dictionary's opinion and the loaded, derogatory use which circulates throughout our culture. Reading Alphabet Tricks, the reader finds herself in that ambivalent place where assumed objectivity is exposed as already tainted by the mores of society. |
