John Sparagana

John Sparagana is an artist and the Grace Christian Vietti Chair in the Visual Arts and Chair of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University. Reto Geiser is an architect and scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. The work of Sparagana is known for its various types of physical manipulation. His large-scale work of art “Crowds & Powder: The Revolutionaries” is translated into the format of a mass-market paperback book. Arranged over eighty double-page spreads, each individual page frames a full-scale fragment of this work. Not only does it allude to a growing discourse on the control and manipulation of visual narrative, as increasingly witnessed from political imagery to popular culture, but it also investigates the way we read and process (visual) language.

The dictionary. The high-gloss fashion ad. The fraught relationship between artist and critic. "Sleeping Beauty" ties these disparate strands of our everyday lives together, only to strip away everything we thought we knew about each of them. A collaboration by the artist John Sparagana and the critic Mieke Bal, this truly cutting-edge work takes the shape of a conversation between his creations - distressed magazine pages - and her words, imagining anew the relationships of image to text and of art to those who write about it. Bal contributes twenty-six essays, one for each letter of the alphabet, which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference volume. Each one enters deeply into Sparagana's art, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy pictures from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. Unmooring the magazine page from its familiar context, Sparagana renders these beautiful rags poetic through his unique art of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness. Just as Sparagana's work intervenes in existing images, so, too, do Bal's explorations qualify existing concepts. But together, in this inaugural volume in the new series "Project Tango: Artists and Writers Together", they have given rise to something wholly new: a prophetic one-artist dictionary that simultaneously reenvisions the untapped interactions of images with words and the potential forms of the book itself.