DATA is a hand-screened artist's book by the San Francisco collage artist Matt Borruso, pairing flat bands of color with high-contrast, halftone-screened photographs to build an ambiguous, quasi-mechanical body language out of appropriated imagery.
Self-published in 2019 under Borruso's own imprint, Visible Publications, the book runs 56 pages in black and white, bound in a two-color, hand-screened softcover printed in an edition of 60. Each copy was pulled in one of two colorways, orange or pink, over a shared cover image of a gloved hand gripping a length of pipe. Borruso builds each spread from cropped, rescreened photographs and ephemera, coarsening found pictures into heavy halftone dots until figures dissolve into pattern and texture. Hand-sewn binding and hand-screening tie the book to the small-run, DIY tradition of West Coast zine and print culture.
Borruso received his MFA from Yale (2004) and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2002), and has shown solo at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Et al., and Black Ball Projects. Since founding Visible Publications in 2010, he has released a steady run of collage-based artist's books, among them Negative Space and Cave Life, held in the library collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, SFMOMA, and the ICP DATA sits within that same body of self-published work.
Notes
IMPORTANT CORRECTION: this research pass was originally requested as 'Christian Holstad — Data.' No book titled 'Data'/'DATA' could be verified anywhere in Christian Holstad's documented bibliography (checked his own site, his primary gallery Andrew Kreps's publications page, and AbeBooks' full title listing for him — none match). Instead, 'DATA' is a real, well-documented 2019 artist's book self-published by Matt Borruso (the same artist behind two other titles in this research batch, 'Negative Space' and the mis-titled 'Visible') under his own imprint, Visible Publications — confirmed via his official site's own chronological works archive (mattborruso.org) and a dedicated book page (mattborruso.org/data/) giving exact specs (56pp, softcover, B&W interior, two hand-screened cover colorways, hand-sewn, 11 x 8.25in, edition of 60). This record catalogs that confirmed Borruso book, NOT a Christian Holstad title. Recommend checking the physical copy's spine/colophon before ingest: if it is genuinely credited to Christian Holstad, this record does not match it and the title needs separate re-research once the real publisher is confirmed from the object itself. mattborruso.org and visiblepublications.com both serve over plain http:// only (https:// fails with a TLS certificate mismatch onto an unrelated domain, monongahelaareachamber.org — a shared-hosting/SNI misconfiguration, not a content concern) http:// URLs are used here for authors[0].url and publisher.url. No ISBN exists for this small-press, hand-bound title.
