Paratext

In these works on paper, grade school penmanship practice pages are used as source material, their guiding lines blurred and rearranged, and their function destabilized. The “pages” here constitute not only a dialogue with the materiality of education but also one side of a material dialogue between caregiver and developing child - especially during crisis schooling due to the pandemic. I am invoking these pedagogical templates, but removing them from the realm of utility. Disorienting rather than orienting, inhibitive rather than instructive, and dissipating rather than delineating, the pigments undo the parameters useful for instruction. They are visual meditations on the nature of linguistic knowledges and the varied conditions of their production.