shelflife by visitor

I can’t believe I released this thing almost a year ago and keep forgetting to mention it. I posted about Volume 1 of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK last year. That volume was a series of 5 hand-painted posters addressing the hardships facing families in what remains today, an uncertain job market. The relevance of many of the tableaux depicted in that volume has been amplified by events having occurred since its release.

Volume 2 OF BUT THEY DON’T BLINK tackled the decaying US social safety net. Now, more than perhaps last year when it was released, do the tableaux in this volume bear weight. Beyond this administration’s rhetoric and circumlocution–very few of the topics discussed in the first 2 volumes of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK have been substantially addressed. The issues broached by BLINK still plague a massive percentage of Americans. Instead of embarking on a long-winded diatribe about those issues, I’ll just share the images I drew:

Each of the 3 volumes of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK consists of 5 individually hand-painted 18×24 inch posters, a block-printed mylar cover and a removable, screw-bound, plastic and cardboard spine. The folios are each signed, numbered and rolled into hand-printed kraft paper blueprint bags. Volume 1 & Volume 2 are available from Printed Matter for $60 each. Volume 3 is in production.

I’ve done a bunch of work for Analog over the years. Most of my favorite projects for them are those they’ve rejected. They first asked me for submissions for either the first or second season they released. The jpeg below’s a bit of that.

Whenever possible, I tend toward physical illustration–screen-printing, painting, stamping, 2-D sculpture…anything anti-computer-centric. These five assemblages were entirely physical and intended to be all-over sublimated–though I’m not sure Analog was doing that at the time–or that I even conveyed that intent to them. Mostly, I think I just had so much fun burning screens, cutting stencils, having lucite laser-cut (this was before I bought a laser) and stealing/sewing construction barricades that I didn’t much care whether they’d buy the work or not. For that line, they picked up a couple of pieces–but not these. Too bad, so sad.