Desert Rose, the latest artist book from Jason Jaworski, combines images created throughout the latter seasons of 2017, along with the most recent ones in 2018, from travels on both hemispheres across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The book’s design and construction were formed by the idea to combine physical elements from the artist’s recent travels, starting with the simple manila envelope that houses the book with the title written by hand in white charcoal, which is the same that triage centers in Bali handed out to persons to hold their passports stranded from the erupting Mt. Agung nearby. The book’s cover is a piece of transparent film meant to mimic a car window, each of which was sun baked in desert dirt over a week’s period whose fragments of earth are designed to dissolve and be pressed upon the pages of the book as each reader looks through it, displacing the dirt throughout the matte black pages and the 85 digital dry prints hand placed and tipped in by hand. In addition, a dehydrated rose petal from bouquets grown outside the artist’s studio adorns the first page, along with the title once again written by hand on top of film-based correction tape. As a further interactive element, the book contains a loose-leaf colophon insert, along with a “Rose Ticket” housed inside a coin envelop which readers can send in to receive a personalized mail art piece in the form of a textwork letter from the artist.
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52 pgs, 21.5 × 14.5 cm, Softcover, 2018, 978-1-7322746-5-5