J. Thomas Pallas

These works initially present themselves in the language of minimalism, as silver monochromes paintings. While one might appreciate them on that level, one may also accept the invitation to engage the piece by scratching the silver ink away, revealing parts of the image below. 

The use of lotto-style scratch-off ink on my prints opens up new possibilities for audience interaction and artistic meaning. The imagery begins totally obscured, and only through the actions of the audience can it be recognized. But simultaneous with the emergence of the imagery is a record of the audience's mark making and handiwork. So the pieces ultimately represent their own ontological becoming, being all at once minimalist painting, graffiti scratches, and destructed imagery.

This selection of work uses imagery of political protests, strikes, and civil disobedience culled from old encyclopedias to call into question the lingering relevance of those movements - are they merely historical occurrences, or can contemporary activists draw upon the rich history of organized dissent?

These works are selections from an on-going series of collages that use the endpapers from old books as the foundation to play with the juxtaposition of image and language.  Organized and composed in the manner of educational book layouts, the text fragments take on a poetic ambiguity that abrades the connection with the images.  

These works are crafted via a gum arabic transfer onto found architectural blueprints.  The images are selected from the Institute for Encyclopedia Amalgamation's collection of 30+ complete encyclopedia sets ranging in age from the 1880s to the 1980s.  The specific images utilized are banal stand-ins that serve as illustrative types for broad topics, typical of imagery used in an educational capacity.  

This suite of photographic prints shows selected pages from the July 4, 1976 special Bicentennial edition of the Detroit Sunday News.  This specific paper encapsulates the jarring juxtaposition at the heart of American exceptionalism: namely, rampant, patriotic celebration alongside the day-to-day struggles of the average citizen.  Analogous to today's situation, these two perspectives can ideologically exist only parallel to each other, yet are presented on one continuous platform.  

In addition to the print works, the artist covered the gallery's windows with the full edition of the newspaper as an installation. Simulating the aesthetics of abandonment, the artist's intervention signals that the gallery has gone out of business.  This gesture attempts to kill off the inherent separation of the art space from everyday life and directly engage with a more public audience.

The Institute for Encyclopedic Amalgamation (IEA) collection serves as a repository and sanctuary for abandoned encyclopedia sets, the once ubiquitous tome of knowledge. Now considered obsolete, we believe in making the collection accessible and available because we recognize their lingering relevance. In so doing, we preserve each piece as a time capsule that acts as a prism onto historical thought; as a gauge of shifting scale of authority and belief; and as artistic source material for (as yet) un-digitized, un-searchable text and image. 

The IEA seeks to dislodge this collected knowledge from its traditional utility and reframe it within a pluralistic, metaphoric environment. Each volume aggregates source material from across the collection and re-presents them as meditations on a specific topic or theme, ranging from the everyday to the uncanny, the psychoanalytical to the political. 

VOLUME 1: HANDS ON LEARNING -
J. THOMAS PALLAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Focusing squarely on the instances where portraits of hands have been offered in the source material seems like a good starting point for a series of hand-printed, hand-bound volumes. During my initial forays through the collection, I was struck by the inclusion of hands to help illustrate seemingly discrete topics. I was bewildered as to why the original publishers would choose to include these hands. They are an extraneous addition that didn’t necessarily aide in my knowledge of the subject matter. Does a hand holding a snake help me to understand what a snake is better than the snake alone might? The same goes for disparate subjects from beans to mathematics. Perhaps the hands do serve a purpose, allowing us to mentally transport ourselves into the illustration and vicariously learn by doing. So I thought it might be worthwhile to hone in on the hands and see what can be learned in the process. The particular selection of hands in this volume hopefully takes on a poetic valence - maintaining a vestigial relationship to their original context while molding to alternative, personal re-imaginings. 

The lithograph prints assembled here have been constructed with careful consideration to the individual image, the page pairings, and the narrative journey through the book. So without further ado, here are some hands - - hands that display, demonstrate, offer, craft, create, record, protect, project, point, stabilize, hold, transact, tabulate, rifle, caress, measure, tickle, verify, plunge, insert, inscribe, infer, and grasp, among many other duties.