Foibles & Avoidance
"I’ve asked my dad many times about when he started doing the NYT weekend crossword puzzle. I still don’t really know but I have pieced together a story. He’s been doing them for a long time, long before I was born.
In the spring of 2012, Dad had an illness that landed him in the hospital for a week and then in a cardiac rehabilitation facility for many weeks afterward. Around this time, I started to collect all of my dad’s weekly puzzles.
At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, my husband, child, and I moved into my parent’s house, my childhood home, as all of the preparation and energy my family of three had put into moving to Berlin was stubbed out. We lived in the house together from March 2020 until August 2020.
This publication is composed of a selection of photographs also made during that period. The texts are crossword clues from puzzles I collected; clues that my dad did not answer and that I found that I could. Had we done the puzzles together, maybe we would have found some joy in the activity. But we mainly stayed separately during those strange days. Not for lack of love, but for a shared love of debate and reasoning out questions that makes it difficult to be in the same room for too long. Leading us to Foibles and Avoidance."
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Foibles & Avoidance is a collection of 29 individual black and white riso 7x10" prints on card stock, companioned with a 16 page booklet of text, contained within a recycled manilla file folder. It was printed in an edition of 100 in July 2024 with with a Risograph SF9450 & RZ310, at Chute Studio, in Oakland, CA.
This publication was typeset in Arial Narrow and an original typeface created from the artist’s father’s handwriting; the custom alphabet was pulled from a collection of his weekly New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. Conversations for this book began at ACRE Residency in Steuben, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2022, with continued development of this project at In Cahoots Residency in Petaluma, California in the summer of 2023. This book would not be possible without the time and space these programs support.
Foibles & Avoidance can be purchased here as the portfolio, or as a bundle with a handset letterpress print created as part of the residency at InCahoots in the summer of 2023. A special edition is forth coming.
An accompanying playlist to this publication can be found here.
An original letterpress print was created at InCahoots Residency in the summer of 2023 during the process of creating the portfolio. It was handset in wood and lead type, printed with a Vandercook Universal 3, on to Stonehenge Fawn paper.
It is available as a stand alone print and as a bundle with the portfolio.
