Everything Has a Language
By Marnie Powers-Torrey
[Salt Lake City]: Marnie Powers-Torrey, 2019. Edition of 100.

3" x 6.5". Materials: paper; ink; wax; gray Fabriano Tiziano and white & cream Ingres papers. Printed on a Risograph duplicator. Interlocking loops accordion structure. Split edition of waxed and unwaxed sheets.

Marnie Powers-Torrey: "Printed from around 75 found objects, this book sculpture is a conglomerate of the past and a document of the here and now. Each of these objects carries its own narrative, inherent to its current shape and surface, told through stamped ink. The form is Hedi Kyle's interlocking loops structure. "

Levi Sherman, artistbookreview.com: “The great achievement of this book is that such lofty speculations arise from what is, in fact, documentation of various found objects. Powers-Torrey’s process of mono-printing and stamping directly from inked objects gives an interesting and complex ontological status to both the objects and the resulting images. The images are narrative, built layer by layer from different forms, yet each mark is an index, the physical trace of an object. Thus, the objects are also subjects, the way that photography is always also about light. …

"’Everything Has a Language’ carries on the tradition of artists’ books as documentation and collection, but pushes the boundaries of intelligibility. It also seems to tap into newer currents in the broader art world, such as the influence of Object Oriented Ontology or other Post-humanisms.

Powers-Torrey lets objects speak for themselves, perhaps even among themselves. It is up to the human reader to make their own meaning, and both the artist and reader leave their mark on the book as they do this. The balance of this deeply personal, embodied meaning-making with the sense that the book’s images recede infinitely beyond translation is a productive and enjoyable tension. (See full review at www.artistbookreviews.com/2019/10/01/everything-has-a-language ).
$30 unwaxed
$50 waxed