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.
