For the catalogue of Christina Quarles’ exhibition Living in the Wake at Kistefos Museum in Norway, we created an object that plays with the expectation of what a traditional book-object should look like. The four edges of the catalogue are printed with a continuous pattern taken from Christina’s recent painting Eddy, creating an ambiguity about which side holds the spine. The landscape orientation purposefully steers the viewer into an immersive experience of the often wide paintings and installation views.
‘Quarles is widely celebrated for her fluid, dynamic figuration that grapples with the instability of identity and the complexity of embodiment. Her work challenges the boundaries of legibility and representation, creating spaces where the self can be fragmented, overlapping, and constantly remade. As the artist notes, “There [are] these larger overarching narratives of the work about what it is to be in a body, what it is to move through the world in a body, what it is to contend with wanting to have people be able to immediately read you, but then having parts of yourself that contradict that legibility or undermine that experience.”’ (Kate Smith)
