Vincent Katz and Wayne Gonzales: Judge Poem by Vincent Katz.
Judge is an artist's book collaboration between poet Vincent Katz and artist Wayne Gonzales. In 2005, during the confirmation hearings for Judge John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, Katz wrote a long poem made completely of text taken from The New York Times, highly edited and compressed, focusing on color words and details in order to get at emotions behind the facts as presented by the newspaper. The poem's alternately mundane and jarring, often contradictory, barrage of phrases suddenly evens out into unexpected humor or calm. Around 2002, Gonzales had similarly begun to work with images of the Bush administration and representations of patriotism in an attempt to record the emotional and psychological climate of the time. His source images were appropriated from the internet, taken apart, and reconstructed into graphic works that, while recognizable, have a haunting, ghostly quality. The resulting book, designed by Gonzales and Katz, is a real blending of image and text, a uniquely successful experiment in layering messages in order to arrive at an aesthetic meditation.
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