Forgeries
Forgeries photographs by Laura Zander
Forgeries is a set of three letterpress printed passport-like books that questions the production of authority to mark bodies, land, and papers as “real.” A repeating phrase in the text throughout—“I learned:”—prefaces stories that shaped how I came to understand, and sometimes unlearn, relations and histories of power.
“Bodies” examines how we move ourselves and others through borders—physical, gender, legislative. “Land / Water” explores physical borderlands, technologies that maintain them, and narratives of ownership and belonging. These two books include pressure prints—relief images made from layered paper plates placed behind a blank sheet, run over an inked surface, leaving a mark that records the pressure created by the layers in the printing process. The third book, “Forge,” contains pages made of these paper plates, representing acts of forging and of forgery, evoking the materials from and through which borders are made, enforced, evaded, and pulled apart.
Commissioned by the Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art for the exhibition Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined.