

Apothecary 2012
10 bottles of black ink with labels on wood shelf.
8 x 50 x 10 inches.
Apothecary is based on a simple but provocative idea: fill a series of chemist's bottles with black ink and then 'label' each bottle with a facsimile of a chapter page taken from an old paperback novel. Each seven inch high laboratory bottle is filled with about a half a liter of ink. The pages used to make the labels were carefully selected from scores of of old paperbacks, the first chapter of a book was removed and collated with other book pages with the same number, from one to ten. Selection of the final chapter pages used as labels were made with two structural constraints: 1) each numbered chapter (one to ten) had to have a chapter heading or title, in effect, a brief description of the bottle's (potential) 'contents,' and 2) the text on each page had to end with a complete sentence. The experimental energy of Apothecary is based on the idea that the work is a series of potential stories symbolized by ink in labeled bottles, stories, as it were, yet to be written. Conversely, this is also a work of radical de-mediation, where writing or text is reduced to a series of chapter fragments that label a (traditional) literary medium: ink.