Primary Sources

My work often begins with found texts--books that might help me think through the awkwardness of the present. Making my way through their descriptions and images I find myself searching for signs (an accidental shoulder in the scene, a description repeated like in a dream). Images from the past, even the very recent past, can act as routes or tunnels through “now”. It takes a while. My body is involved. Whose images, whose descriptions, whose maps did we use to get here?

I think about these texts—and the images and

descriptions they contain—as part of an image-inheritance that has shaped the

geographical imaginary, all the more powerful for having slipped into the obscurity of the past. Pulling them apart I pay attention to the way these images have whispered to me, poisoned me, fed me. This is not an analytical process. My body learned the tricks and I am trying to use my body as a tool to unlearn the text (my hands holding the exacto, cutting the images, pinning them to the

wall, spreading the glue along a new joint). I think of each piece, or series,

or exhibition, as a new “epic” text that can be physically encountered all at

once, without having to turn the pages.

The Jefferson Bible (1820)

US Military Blogs and Websites (2003-2015)

The First Photographic Atlas of the Milky Way by E.E. Barnard (1927)

Visual Essays by Joseph Rock published in the National Geographic (1924-1930)

Phenomena of Materialization by Albert Von Notzig (1914)

Glimpses of the World by John Stoddard (1892)

The Chicago World's Fair Catalog (1893)

Selena Kimball

Selena Kimball