Materials Matter design sessions gave way to my own exploration of scientific notation in the form of an artist’s book titled Cognitive Art of CO2: from ball and stick to VB model and beyond (grant 2019, exhib. 2020a, 2020b).
In this work, graphics are walking the reader through 12 interrelated notations that scientists use to express the carbon dioxide molecule. This book serves to illuminate how scientists modulate their ways of expression as they change their focus on notions relating to the molecule.
Blade, the simplest intervention tool, penetrates nature using the mechanical advantage of its sloped edge, whether on a plow, a sword, or a chisel. Such advantages make history.
Advantage is an artist’s book hybridizing the language of infographics and comics. In the run of 84 pages, I have devised a fable of technology and the inclined plane, envisioning how techniques shaped human geography. The book was produced in a board book edition of 6 copies (2016), as well as a short-run signature bound edition of 100 copies (2017). It is featured in the special collections of the Getty Institute, TheMet, MoMA, Ryerson Library, Newberry Library, and more.
The story is a culmination of my studies on design and technology history, as well as many years of teaching a graphic design course rethinking comic book storytelling. There are forty spreads, each serving as a historical stage, whose elements are largely modeled after visual representations of technology and warfare found in ancient and medieval artwork, and drawn from archaeological studies. Advantage envisions geographical advantage; the emergence of mechanical advantage; and inquires on how cultures tend to channel their knowledge in a purely visual narrative in the tradition of Gerd Arntz, Lynd Ward, and Frans Masereel.
The book's print edition was exhibited at the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds (2017), UK's largest comic art event; as well as the 2018 Fumetto Comic Festival Luzern, Switzerland.
An artist’s book interpreting Three O'clock (1939), a short story by Thomas Wolfe. I re-imagined this story on a typographic sound stage by giving concrete expression to the speeches and sounds of the text. I blended these elements with visual iconography in order to visually express the story’s raw power.
This artist’s book translates Morrison’s fable about ‘language as power,’ into book spreads that serve as narrative stage. The book expands on the narrative by giving concrete form to some of the subtexts implied by the author’s text.
In this experimental book I portrayed key events in Roman history using Livy’s text coupled with image sequences borrowed from microbiology text books. I wanted to create a satirical interplay between macro- and micro-level organizational systems.
I spent considerable time during the summer of 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Health Sciences Library deriving dramatic narratives from micrographs to use in this book.
Accordion-fold book designed in a way to point to a potential conflict between the two constructive sequences portrayed on its opposite faces. The destructive threat of an assembly sequence (face two) is addressed by pin marks made on the numerical entries that puncture spots on the photo album (face one).
I borrowed the term negentropy from physics, that describes an increase in organizational, structural and functional order. The parenthesis in book’s title points to the fact that a confrontation between the two sides of my book will remove the prefix neg- giving way to pure entropy.
I experimented with panel- and speech-ballon-free comic book pages while envisioning a scene from the screenplay of the 1939 film Ninotchka I utilized typographic styling and compositional layering to portray changes in point of view and passages of time.
This experimental book layers two historical texts that pits two opposing philosophies against each other within the imaginative space of a picture book. Hans Christian Andersen's The Matchstick Girl (1845) is a tale of empathy illustrated in the wordless tradition of Lynd Ward. The scenes are accompanied by Henry Fords’s words championing leadership and opportunity (from Today and Tomorrow, 1926). I was motivated by my own dual existence at the time—attending grad school classes while working in the industry.
At a formal level this project was inspired by W.J.T. Mitchell’s imagetext concept. It was my first attempt to create seamless integrations between image and text by blending my charcoal drawings and hand-cut letters to achieve a visceral effect. I worked tireless with my supervisor Marek Brzozowski who made me change my layouts over and over again—teaching me many lessons about design along the way !
