This Land is My Land Artist's Book by Thad Higa
This piece is one of five finalists for the 2024 MCBA Prize, and will be included in the 2024 MCBA Prize Exhibition from August 17th - October 12th, 2024. Pieces purchased before the end of the exhibition will ship on October 18th, 2024.
Additionally, this piece is featured in the August 2024 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artists’ books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here.
“This Land Is My Land is a fictionalized narrative from the imagined headspace of current day, online white supremacists, nationalists, and their sympathizers. It is an effort to see & know the many activities and contradictions of hatred, bias, and cynicism rooted in sloganized and weaponized language. It is an attempt to unveil the relationships between white supremacy, American exceptionalism and capitalist proprietary themes of shopping malls, graveyards, land trusts and development. But at its core, it is an exhibition of subterranean reading comprehension and the crux of urgent types of legibility in the oversaturated digital age.
This book makes use of different types of cheap papers, physically torn pages, and two multi-level foldouts with the max foldout size at 22 x 17 in. Materials exude a cheapness aligned with the capitalistic undergirding of the American society churning out these mentalities as products. It must flaunt its ordinariness; thus its naked book boards with packing tape, exposed spine, printer paper mixed with a cheap glossy photo paper, and facsimile rips caked on broken sidewalks.
While the mixed haptics bolster subtextual, psychic effects of the signs on each page, the foldouts demonstrate an interpenetration of reader and book object. In light of the eurocentric subject-matter, culpability and complicity is in the act of reading; it is in the handling of the pages. It is in the turning of each page, the accumulation of time-passage, moving through the land, and finally, in the opening of the two fold-out sections. The ways in which we read–what we extract from those people, objects, cultures, lands that we interact with–is a reflection of our culture and ourselves.
Words within are dog-whistles. Symbols are contextualized by real life hate-crimes, collaged into an abstraction that strips its meaning, and in its nudity it is rage in every direction. Who started the fire, what fuels the fire, how do we put out the fire? What will the fire consume? Everything. Who must put the fire out? Everyone, everywhere.
This Land Is My Land is an iterative, imperfect cultural token which can only exist within a myriad of other important cultural works. Publishing this work was not born of the desire to neatly package an idea or finalize a product. Rather, it is a question mark that must make steps towards generative representation of the systemic conundrums of reading comprehension and general education in America. It must reveal inherent flaws in binary modes of thinking, while simultaneously celebrating the abstract multiplication of legibility as words and images move in chorus through the book object. If it does not do this, it will be amended by this author or the next.” -Thad Higa
8” x 5.5”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
This piece is one of five finalists for the 2024 MCBA Prize, and will be included in the 2024 MCBA Prize Exhibition from August 17th - October 12th, 2024. Pieces purchased before the end of the exhibition will ship on October 18th, 2024.
Additionally, this piece is featured in the August 2024 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artists’ books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here.
“This Land Is My Land is a fictionalized narrative from the imagined headspace of current day, online white supremacists, nationalists, and their sympathizers. It is an effort to see & know the many activities and contradictions of hatred, bias, and cynicism rooted in sloganized and weaponized language. It is an attempt to unveil the relationships between white supremacy, American exceptionalism and capitalist proprietary themes of shopping malls, graveyards, land trusts and development. But at its core, it is an exhibition of subterranean reading comprehension and the crux of urgent types of legibility in the oversaturated digital age.
This book makes use of different types of cheap papers, physically torn pages, and two multi-level foldouts with the max foldout size at 22 x 17 in. Materials exude a cheapness aligned with the capitalistic undergirding of the American society churning out these mentalities as products. It must flaunt its ordinariness; thus its naked book boards with packing tape, exposed spine, printer paper mixed with a cheap glossy photo paper, and facsimile rips caked on broken sidewalks.
While the mixed haptics bolster subtextual, psychic effects of the signs on each page, the foldouts demonstrate an interpenetration of reader and book object. In light of the eurocentric subject-matter, culpability and complicity is in the act of reading; it is in the handling of the pages. It is in the turning of each page, the accumulation of time-passage, moving through the land, and finally, in the opening of the two fold-out sections. The ways in which we read–what we extract from those people, objects, cultures, lands that we interact with–is a reflection of our culture and ourselves.
Words within are dog-whistles. Symbols are contextualized by real life hate-crimes, collaged into an abstraction that strips its meaning, and in its nudity it is rage in every direction. Who started the fire, what fuels the fire, how do we put out the fire? What will the fire consume? Everything. Who must put the fire out? Everyone, everywhere.
This Land Is My Land is an iterative, imperfect cultural token which can only exist within a myriad of other important cultural works. Publishing this work was not born of the desire to neatly package an idea or finalize a product. Rather, it is a question mark that must make steps towards generative representation of the systemic conundrums of reading comprehension and general education in America. It must reveal inherent flaws in binary modes of thinking, while simultaneously celebrating the abstract multiplication of legibility as words and images move in chorus through the book object. If it does not do this, it will be amended by this author or the next.” -Thad Higa
8” x 5.5”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
This piece is one of five finalists for the 2024 MCBA Prize, and will be included in the 2024 MCBA Prize Exhibition from August 17th - October 12th, 2024. Pieces purchased before the end of the exhibition will ship on October 18th, 2024.
Additionally, this piece is featured in the August 2024 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artists’ books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here.
“This Land Is My Land is a fictionalized narrative from the imagined headspace of current day, online white supremacists, nationalists, and their sympathizers. It is an effort to see & know the many activities and contradictions of hatred, bias, and cynicism rooted in sloganized and weaponized language. It is an attempt to unveil the relationships between white supremacy, American exceptionalism and capitalist proprietary themes of shopping malls, graveyards, land trusts and development. But at its core, it is an exhibition of subterranean reading comprehension and the crux of urgent types of legibility in the oversaturated digital age.
This book makes use of different types of cheap papers, physically torn pages, and two multi-level foldouts with the max foldout size at 22 x 17 in. Materials exude a cheapness aligned with the capitalistic undergirding of the American society churning out these mentalities as products. It must flaunt its ordinariness; thus its naked book boards with packing tape, exposed spine, printer paper mixed with a cheap glossy photo paper, and facsimile rips caked on broken sidewalks.
While the mixed haptics bolster subtextual, psychic effects of the signs on each page, the foldouts demonstrate an interpenetration of reader and book object. In light of the eurocentric subject-matter, culpability and complicity is in the act of reading; it is in the handling of the pages. It is in the turning of each page, the accumulation of time-passage, moving through the land, and finally, in the opening of the two fold-out sections. The ways in which we read–what we extract from those people, objects, cultures, lands that we interact with–is a reflection of our culture and ourselves.
Words within are dog-whistles. Symbols are contextualized by real life hate-crimes, collaged into an abstraction that strips its meaning, and in its nudity it is rage in every direction. Who started the fire, what fuels the fire, how do we put out the fire? What will the fire consume? Everything. Who must put the fire out? Everyone, everywhere.
This Land Is My Land is an iterative, imperfect cultural token which can only exist within a myriad of other important cultural works. Publishing this work was not born of the desire to neatly package an idea or finalize a product. Rather, it is a question mark that must make steps towards generative representation of the systemic conundrums of reading comprehension and general education in America. It must reveal inherent flaws in binary modes of thinking, while simultaneously celebrating the abstract multiplication of legibility as words and images move in chorus through the book object. If it does not do this, it will be amended by this author or the next.” -Thad Higa
8” x 5.5”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
Thad Higa (he/him) is a Korean-Okinawan American language worker, born 1989 on Ohlone Land, California, raised in Hawaiʻi, ad currently based on Oakland. Thad works with artists' books, concrete poetry, printmaking, collage, typography, graphic design and living rooms. He investigates the intersections of written and visual language, advertising, social technology, capitalism, white supremacy, and their roles in controlling perceptions of reality, value and legibility.
Instagram: @Qrwhzgub
