Aaron Cohick
Louisville, KY
https://www.newlightspress.com/
IG: @newlightspress

Drift • Fragment
2024
Mixed drawing media and Risograph
5″ x 12.5″ x 1″ (open)

Artist Statement

Drift • Fragment is an editioned, hand-painted, text-image poem about reading, memory, time, labor, and rest. Each copy contains the same text but the composition of the two-page spreads in each copy is determined by a unique set of random variables. Those variables control the position of each text block, the position and size of the torn pieces, and the layering of all of the elements. In each copy different moments of the text are cropped, obscured, and revealed.

The twenty-four page spreads track the hours of the day using a palette of colors that was sampled from photographs of the author’s home and work spaces at different times of day. The colors are consistent from copy to copy.

Three threads of text move through the book, each rendered in a different size of an experimental set of modular letterforms called the Threshold Alphabet. The modular system of the Threshold Alphabet is based on windows, doors, and bookshelves. The unfamiliarity of some of the letterforms, combined with the fragmentation and layering of the text, is meant to slow the reader down and expand the time of reading. The goal is to transform reading from an activity of rapid scanning and consumption of information to a space that the reader can dwell in, a space of slow time and careful, open-ended attention.

After the entire edition was painted all extant copies of the text, both digital and physical, were destroyed. Each copy of the book is now a whole text, “complete with missing parts,” (Beckett). Every individual reading– finished, in-progress, or potential– across one copy or many– is a layer of the multi-threaded reading that is the true substance of the book.