Strange Inheritance, A Riot Book

2020

A project that began as a performance piece, Strange Inheritance, A Riot Book is an edition of 45 art books that pull from the research, documents, photographs, and performances that I conducted around the visualization of queer monuments in public spaces. Traveling the US and Europe, I cleaned and helped restore Queer Monuments that were under disrepair or just needed maintenance work. Along the way, I interviewed historians, activists, and scholars that were working in the same vein of queer visibility and history making. With these books, I used my materials to conceptualize a way in which to rethink how we perceive our LGBTQ+ histories. This avenue of study is still a relatively new undertaking in the larger scope of archival studies and is something that I feel needs to be understood differently. Much of our histories have either been discarded or sequestered to private and special collections, because of its rarity and ephemeral qualities (pins, t-shirt, posters, etc.). For this reason, I found it important to question ways in which to visibilize a different way of seeing this work. I set out to create a multifaceted way of seeing a book and experiencing its content. Riot Book consists of a collage of imagery and documents that were animated into a short film. That film was exported into frames and each frame is a page in a book. As the images go in and out of the collage, they cascade down the sides of the books, creating a three dimensional viewing of the book and its archived materials. The frames/pages were printed all at once, with each book being connected to the next by way of the cascading images. In total, there were over 26,600 frames printed for this project, creating an edition of 45 books in total. This project was created during my artist residency at Paper Machine.

RYAN LEITNER

RYAN LEITNER