Joe Gilmore
Joe Gilmore
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design
Joe Gilmore graphic design

ARS 7
2020
175 ✕ 235 mm, 24 pp.
Overprinted found magazine pages

ARS is a series of books constructed from full-page gallery and museum advertisements sourced from Mousse Magazine. Each book begins as a stack of autonomous images – ads designed to function as discrete, self-contained propositions. By folding these pages and binding them into a codex, the work activates the hidden geometry of bookmaking: the logic of imposition. This structural operation produces unexpected juxtapositions, where half of one advert occupies the left-hand page and half of another occupies the right. Together, they form hybrid exhibition spaces—odd, humorous, and sometimes strangely beautiful.

What emerges is not mere collage but a topology of reading. The codex’s physical structure, its folds, spreads, and sequencing, becomes a generative constraint, dictating adjacency and creating new syntactic relationships between images. Normally invisible, this algorithm of imposition is revealed as a conceptual engine, transforming paratext into text and exposing the book as an active agent in meaning-making. In this sense, ARS operates as a counter-reading of the magazine, where the material operations of folding and binding override editorial intention and give rise to a second-order narrative.

By foregrounding the mechanics of the codex, ARS invites reflection on the autonomy of content and the contingency of context. It asks: what happens when the structural logic of the book asserts itself as form? When the container becomes the author? In these hybrid spaces, the book ceases to be a neutral vessel and instead performs as a site of montage – an algorithmic collage dictated by its own topology.

 

Exhibitions:

Joe Gilmore, 'ARS', Form, The Netherlands

Joe Gilmore, 'Bookwork', Henry Moore Institute Research Library, Leeds, UK

'Other People’s Projects: Pre-Echo Press', group exhibition (curated by Matt Connors with Brian W. Ferry, Luigi Ghirri, Joe Gilmore, Nate Harrington, Elisabeth Kley, Sanou Oumar, Ryan Preciado, Nick Relph, Ken Tisa), White Columns, New York, USA