The tragic news of the violent destruction of books from the Hormel Center of the San
Francisco Public Library was immediately shocking. The inventive idea to reverse this act
by creating artworks from the damaged materials inspired me to participate in this project.
I received the damaged “Tattoo” book (author and title are unknown, due to the damage
the book received), and I allowed the book pages to direct my approach to the work I
would make. Initially the photographs of tattooed skin and colored markings appealed to
me as visually seductive, grotesque and erotic. Beyond these impressions, I noticed the
majority of the photos credited the tattoos as drawn by “Artist Unknown” rendering the
artwork authorless. By contrast, many of the tattoos include banners with specific names,
homage to lovers, mothers, or the dead. This contradiction of specificity, and anonymity
is the theme the work Artist Unknown addresses. The second element to this work
manifest itself as a “cut-out” or cutting action I applied to the material to create this artwork.
This was directly influenced by the vandal’s use of the same method to destroy the books.
The violence of knife into surface, be it book or skin, property or person, continued to
overtake my thoughts as I made this piece. Similar to a tattoo needle piercing the skin to
mark it, I have cut into the paper’s surface to re-mark images and to alter the context of the
text. This reorganization of body segments, cut-out space, and text on dimensional panels
creates planes of inside and outside where the viewer can peer into this mystery of
irreversible fetish and destructive beautification of the human skin.
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