Tuesday 2 June 2009

About everything | philip davenport, 2009


About everything | philip davenport, 2009

Printed book
22cm x 22cm

About everything is an elegy for power brokers and mass-production, it was constructed from a years-worth of newspapers, reordered and reshaped. The titles of ancient dictators - high-ranking officials from Rome, Russia, the medieval church - replace our contemporary Presidents and celebrities. As the poem progresses, words are replaced with zeroes, holes. Verses are parallelled with Davenport's photos and fragments of a sound score by Ben Gwilliam.

Design and type-setting is by artist Darren Marsh. The poem was devised by cross-column reading and can be read either vertically or horizontally, so that each verse has many possible paths through it. The images and the words vie for attention – as in news reportage – to make conflicts of meaning.

Available from http://www.applepie-editions.co.uk/

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