RUINS
Jordan Sullivan
Published by Pau Wau Publications

5 1/2" x 7 1/4" 
10 Panels
Leporello fold with Cotten Fabric Covers & Linen Tie
Hand Tipped-in Text Pages
Unique Collage (Inkjet prints on archival bond paper mounted to Arches paper)
Handmade Edition of 15 (Each book is cut from a unique collage and has its own cover)

~~

Lost in the ruins of languages forgotten

The world is a burnt photograph

A corrupted file

A landscape ravaged

Sometimes it hurts

Now that it is all over and unrecognizable

But mostly it feels like life

Unreal

Uncertain

Unforgiving

Unknowable

In the end 

If there is an end

Will we finally have names

Will the features stop blurring

Or will we invent new crimes

New ways of hurting

New beginnings 

New false starts

All this time

Were we writing to erase

And was love always time 

Unmarked

Unimaginable

Or was love hate

A void

A blind policeman in a riot

And are we a book

One where the words are not read they are remembered

And where will our souls go

If infinity is not infinite

If heaven and hell are real

And what if they are not

Your reflection in a fogged mirror

Looks like the invention of time

Like the difference between sadness and sorrow

Or loneliness and the moon 

What is this then

If nothing is real

Where is the world

Is the earth a ruin

What happens to the ones who have escaped

And what happens to the ones left behind 

Living only to catch a glimpse

of a hope unending

~~

RUINS is a publication made in conjunction with Jordan Sullivan’s installation, ”The California Sun Was All I Had For Breakfast, And It Burned My Eyes”, exhibited in Shanghai, China in September 2017.

The installation and resulting book are composed of redemptive pieces; things made from failures through a process open to destruction and mistakes. The prints are initially made on an engineering printer, the lo-fi nature of the prints is a decisive gesture against the image as a precious object. Each print is then saturated with chemicals, left in the rain, and manipulated by hand.

This cumulative process results in the colors of the images seeping into the backs of the prints. The images are then flipped over, cut-up, and reassembled. From these photographs of physical landscapes, psychological spaces begin to emerge. Abstract fragments and scraps of opaque evidence recall open-ended moments from Jordan’s lived experience. All that is seen of the original photographic base is the hazy nebula of colors that have bled onto the backs of each print.

For the publication a selection of these prints were cut, folded, and bound. The cover of each book was made by dragging sheets of book cloth through the residual ink that was pulled from each of the destroyed photographs.