"the book of selfish inquiry" - what it is.

"This book contains several of the pen and ink illustrations created between 2003-2004 that accompanied a text which was initially titled "The Hypocrite's Manifesto."

The text itself was written in one sitting during a drug withdrawal.

The psychological backdrop that set the stage for this work is complicated, as I was young and living alone with my grandmother who was to dying at the time.

I was affected by the city and its mechanisms. The cycles of money earned and spent by the masses of people operating just outside. The promise of better things to come was a horrific fable.

I was especially angered by the excess of billboards. I felt visually assaulted whenever outside and came to gravely resent the world around me. Its visage was so frail and insignificant, failing completely to acknowledge the city as it truly was, the people who inhabited it and the condition of suffering I saw everywhere in the average person. "IT," worthless, false and so meaningless when held up against the life that was slowly moving from Ruth's body. Nothing in the public sphere was in place to reflect us.

The face of the world was a lying one....and still is.

The text, now lost, and images herein gave way to a larger project my sister and I dubbed "The Leviathan Movement."

Many of the illustrations were blown up, turned into silkscreens and posters printed by hand onto large sheets of architectural paper we would collect from a nearby dumpster.

In the nighttime, Sarah Ray and I would mask our faces and plaster OUR propaganda over the city. This was our ritual. This was our effort to offer the common citizen a different message. We hoped to ask questions as well as to upset.

The image "Smile" was the most prolifically distributed of the images.

The time that followed the peak of our work as a team led to death of my most cherished person, Granny, to whom I owe all that had been good in my life and to the departure of my sister who went on to pursue higher education elsewhere. I was left in a state of fracture and set the work of the Leviathan Movement aside and was not able to leave our home for some time.

This book hopes to archive some of what is left from that year."

 


only 5 copies have been printed and will be available on this upcoming tour with Deafheaven