cathy nguyen
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plexus (2016)

Plexus (2016) is an artist’s book that weaves the voices of two stories: “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges (1941) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), works that were created at different times, with different plots and intended audiences. However, both of these stories navigate themes of dreams, illusion, and confusion, ideas that question reality, order, and language as linear constructs.

To explore these ideas, Plexus features triangular shaped pages that can be reconfigured into two and three-dimensional pathways of reading. The hope is that the reader can never really experience the work the same way each time due to the structure’s playful and nonlinear form. It is a book that can only be activated and engaged by the reader’s movement, challenging a static, one-way delivery and reception of reading.

Plexus includes photography whose metadata has been manipulated to achieve a colorful and chaotic effect, while each page was letterpress printed by hand using polymer plates. Digital and traditional methods of printing were paired to produce the work, paralleling the work’s plexus of interwoven authorial voices and narratives. 

Originally produced as a limited-edition hand-bound and letterpress-printed artist's book in an edition of 2, with a second-edition planned for digital production.

plexus
2016
Artist's book WITH archival digital prints, polymer plate letterpress, AND triangular slipcase

Plexus (2016) is an artist’s book that weaves and reinterprets the voices of two stories: “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges (1941) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), works that both navigate elusive themes of dreams, space, and time. Both stories create worlds that defy the possibility of making logical sense of reality, language, and materiality, inspiring us to realize that the complex nature of life eludes immediate interpretation and definitive resolve. 

To explore these ideas, Plexus features triangular-shaped pages that can reconfigure into two and three-dimensional pathways of reading. These pages can be read fluidly in many configurations: sculpturally with pages intersecting in different angles; flat like an opened map; or even singularly like pages in conventional page-turning. The hope is that readers experience a journey that provokes unexpected and even imaginative responses, reminiscent of Borges’s and Carroll’s works that destabilize linear conventions.

Imagery consists of photography whose metadata has been algorithmically manipulated to achieve colorful and distorted effects, while each page was letterpress printed by hand using polymer plates. Quotes from “The Garden of Forking Paths'' are represented in the typeface Template Gothic, designed by Barry Deck in 1990 as one of the first digital fonts to embrace the aesthetic of grunge and imperfection, which I thought would coincide with the unruly  nature of Plexus. Meanwhile, quotes from Alice are captured in the typeface Futura, designed in 1927 by Paul Renner and well-known for its geometric proportions, echoing the triangular forms of this book’s structure. Digital and traditional methods of printing were paired to produce the work, paralleling the work’s plexus of interwoven authorial voices and narratives. Dimensions variable; approx. 40" wide by 30" high when flattened and 7"x7"x1" when closed.