By Angela Willetts & National Monument Press
Risograph artistbook, edition of 100. 2017
Relationships was created as part of a solo exhibition titled I Am Maneuvering With Difficulty at Embark Gallery in August of 2017 as part of Embark’s R+D Projects program. This exhibition was a multi-media response to research surrounding Fort Mason, a decomissioned US military base in San Francisco, CA. It took as a starting point the notion of the fortress, and drew lines between military strategies, personal experiences of protection and vulnerability, and forms of communication. In Relationships, the language of international maritime signals is borrowed to speak about vulnerability and the search for love. The images are created from painted renditions of international maritime signal flags, layered together. They reference the alphanumeric codes that determine the accompanying text. By stacking the flags, rather than presenting them in series, new images are allowed to emerge from the confused information.
