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Family Tree

Item date(s): 2013

Julie Chen  - (book artist)


Pages: unpaged
Size: 222mm
Inscription: Signed by the artist
Edition: #32/50


Place publication: Berkeley, CA
Publisher: Flying Fish Press
Exhibition 2022

Additional notes:
Family Tree was written and designed by Julie Chen and assembled with assistance from Faith Hale and Kendyll Pappas Dittman. Some surfaces were digitally printed and others were lazer engraved. The set of sixteen blocks presents six variations based on a single image, and can be rearranged by the reader in a myriad of different combinations.

The blocks are contained in a flip-top box with the colophon on the inner base.

9 x 9.25 x 2.625" cloth-covered drop spine clamshell box containing 16 two inch cubes. Digital prints on mulberry paper laminated onto maple wood blocks. Paper title illustration on lid. Julie Chen: "Family Tree is a piece about the idea of personal identity as framed by one's family history and family relationships. The piece consists of 16 wooden blocks with visual and written content on all 6 sides. When the blocks are placed in 4 rows of 4 blocks each, a continuous image with corresponding text is revealed. Each of the rows can be turned in order to reveal new content, or the blocks can be jumbled to allow the readers to create their own permutations of text and image." Created using Artist Book Ideation Cards for an Ideation show at the Abecedarian Gallery in the fall of 2013. Technique: unfamiliar Layout: centered on the page Paper: neutral Text: none (thrown back); Text second draw: self-generated Image: extracted from a single image Color: favorite Structure: unbound (set of cards, series of prints) Adjectives: quiet or subtle, mystical or spiritual, futuristic, non-sequential, and formal Julie Chen: "I struggled with this draw at first mainly because of the 'no text' prompt that I originally got. In the end, I decide to exercise my option to throw one card back, and drew a new card from the text category. My original plan was to create a deck of cards, but as my ideas for the project progressed, I became more and more interested in the idea of random access of content that was afforded by creating something that was unbound. This eventually led me to the idea of creating a set of blocks so that each individual block in the set would have six possible sides of content that could be mixed and matched with the six possible sides of all the other blocks. The theme for the piece was based on work that I was already involved with on the theme of family history and personal identity. As is often the case with my process, my structure ideas turned out to inform my content ideas in unexpected, but meaningful ways."

Exhibition notes:
Creative Research: The Artists’ Books of Veronika Schäpers, Robbin Ami Silverberg and Julie Chen JBCBA, WAM

22 September to 15 December 2022

Ref: GB/14904















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