douglas cason

History is broken down into countless pieces of fact. However, when it is woven together as a whole, does it often lose its truth? Through an intervention with text, objects, and the traditional formats and trappings of contained knowledge, historical narratives become altered and contemporized. These historical documents are manipulated to the point where fact and fiction lines blur.  The new work acts as a catalyst for reevaluating the validity of traditional historical narratives by creating newer fictionalized histories, which highlight irrational or problematic ideologies long overlooked over time. Photographs interface with ink, forcing one to search through layers as they pursue the concept of identity.  Books become modern illuminated manuscripts through cover-to-cover revampings through painting, printmaking, bookbinding and digital manipulations.   The end products become museum-type, installations of categorized and encased books, photographs, paintings and ephemera that work together to create a falsified past. In some cases, the installation becomes viewer interactive making it possible to sit and “read” the books along with dossiers of related artifacts as if one was stepping into a scriptorium or library of a compulsive scribe or historian. It is with this ability to “read” the work, handle objects or study each under glass that information becomes reanimated.  What was once a cast-off allusion to the past becomes alive again but with new identity, rooted in modernity and footnoted by the past.