JOHN RYAN BRUBAKER

Strange Cities

Portland photographer, John Ryan Brubaker, first showed me the photographs he shot last spring while traveling through Vietnam in the form of a small artist book he had made by hand. Shot on 35mm film, the photographs record the tangled chaos, the wounded patterns, & the congested horizon, street & railway lines that comprise any strange city a traveler gets lost in. The book, by nature requiring reexamination & revision, became a tool of understanding, a medium through which the disparate interrelation of countless photographs found meaning & order. Accordingly, our mid-July & August show, Strange Cities, represents an experiment in deconstruction, a tearing apart of the bound book & the transformation of its pages into framed pieces for the gallery wall, to be viewed at random or be read start to finish. But we have not jettisoned the book itself altogether; the result of a design & publishing collaboration between Ampersand & Brubaker, Strange Cities has been published in an edition of 100 copies, printed here in Portland & handsewn by the artist, the first ten of which include an original gelatin silver print. Brubaker has also made a special edition of five handmade copies comprised of archival pigment prints sewn in signatures, which also includes two gelatin silver prints.

July 16 to August 22, 2011

To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home.  - Henry Miller

© 2011

John Ryan Brubaker

ampersand

all rights reserved

View the artist’s website here.

Purchase Strange Cities book here.