Completed primarily during my scholarship at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich in 2010, each of the following images corresponds to one chapter of Joyce’s novel Ulysses. One of my initial goals was accessibility; to provide a way into a book that I think everyone should – and can – read. I began the project with a need to share the unexpected humor of the novel, and did so with postcard-sized, letterpressed excerpts, hung on bulletin boards in my college student union and left anonymously in friends’ mailboxes. I wanted to publicize, make at once intimate and approachable, a text which has largely been obfuscated by a realm of academia.
The prints are an attempted continuation of Joyce’s linguistic exercises, intending to alter the time frame in which people move through a space in the same way he intended to alter the pace at which people read. I also wanted to explore what it means to “represent” another person’s creative work, and to manipulate the levels of signification of words and images. These prints attempt to highlight and magnify through a visual medium the semiotic discrepancies that arise between what we read and what we understand, with a focus on humor.