Hands and Feet and Their Supports

Matt Borruso's Hands and Feet and Their Supports treats the body's outermost extremities as stand-ins for the whole person, tracing hands and feet as they are cast, copied, and recast across years of studio research.

The book gathers reference images, found photographs, scans, magazine clippings, .jpgs, and installation documentation. Borruso assembled the material around his 2018 exhibition of the same title at Cloaca Projects in San Francisco. There he showed concrete and felt casts of hands and feet on powder-coated steel supports, alongside screen-printed newsprint collages. A strict but invisible grid organizes the pages. Throughout, the work returns to the idea of a \"support\" — structural, ideological, architectural, or as plain as a shoe on a foot. Visible Publications, Borruso's own imprint, issued the book in an edition of 175. It is a softcover, printed on a digital press, with two-color screen-printed covers and hand-sewn binding; each copy was collated and bound by hand.

Borruso is a San Francisco-based artist working across sculpture, print, and installation; Visible Publications is the imprint through which he publishes his own books alongside work by other artists.