Look!

Featured in the SMFA Print and Paper Exhibition (2025)

This little book might look simple at first, but I made it to challenge what it means to actually “read.” I wanted it to frustrate and invite at the same time. I tied it together with a blue satin ribbon because I liked how it felt both like a gift and a secret to unfold. Inside are riso-printed pages where ordinary phrases—“hello,” “can you see,” “read me”—get broken apart, pixelated, or blurred until they’re not so easy to take in.

On one side of the accordion fold, the word “look!” is literally cut right through the paper. It’s both a command and a plea, a kind of wound in the book that mirrors the gap between seeing and truly understanding. The structure itself loops back on itself, with two accordion folds joined at the ends, so there isn’t really a beginning or an end, just a cycle you can enter from either side.

I leaned into the quirks of the risograph: its soft edges, its slight misalignments. Those accidents made the text feel even harder to grasp. And then there’s the ribbon—just the act of untying it turns the book into a small ritual, raising expectations that the pages immediately unsettle. Every time someone opens it, I hope it becomes a little drama of interpretation, where you have to decide how much effort you’re willing to put into making sense of words that might never fully give themselves up.

Please contact me for a viewing of the whole book.