In addition to several published “livres d’artiste” ( i.e. Distillation: BenjaminBaudelaire, & Walter Benjamin à Paris et ailleurs), I am involved in a deconstruction of the physical book and a re reading by means of redaction ( Ulysses & Birds of America for WB).  The redaction is done in gouache on the newsprint pages.  Silver and gold employed for the dual monologues of Molly and Leopold Bloom in James Joyces’s Ulysses; and black for the Birds of America.  For Ulysses, I worked in the first American edition of the book by Random House in 1947, text design by Bennett Cerf. This edition has neither the  shape, color, nor layout of the first edition of Ulysses from Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1922. It is, however, the one with which we are most familiar.  A 1922 facsimile book was re issued  by Dover Press in 2009.   I am especially interested by the innovative  textual physicality of Ulysses. It provided me a base for blocks of small abstract paintings upon the dense monologues of  Molly and Leopold.

The re reading of Birds of America consists of 346 pages of text, both removed from the book and worked as individual images. In this work I redacted all but the words or phrases that coïncidently related to Walter Benjamin and his time spent in Paris as young visitor, flâneur, intellectual , and ultimately exile. The original book, 1965, Harcourt Brace, is by Mary McCarthy. It carries  an introductory dedication to Hannah Arendt, a second cousin to Walter Benjamin. The overlap doesn’t seem coincidental; and therein my interest to work on this particuliar text with its story line parallel to Benajmin’s own.