Negative Space
Negative Space is a hand-bound artist's book by the San Francisco collage artist Matt Borruso, assembling found imagery into a strange, self-contained world of swamp creatures, mushroom-crowned cavemen, and exoskeletal beings.
Working from stacks of found photographs, magazines, and printed ephemera, Borruso collages source images into scenes of ritual and mutation, building a spectral, paranormal realm of evolutionary defects and hybrid bodies. Published under the artist's own imprint, Visible Publications, San Francisco, in a hand-bound edition of 50 hardcover copies with a one-color hand-screened cover and hand-sewn binding a softcover second edition of 100 followed in 2017. The book runs 44 pages in full color, at 10.25 x 7.5 inches (26 x 19 cm).
Borruso received his MFA from Yale University (2004) and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2002), and has shown solo at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 2nd Floor Projects, and Et al. in San Francisco, and Black Ball Projects in Brooklyn. Under Visible Publications, he has made collage-based artist's books since 2010 — including IMAGE File and Cave Life — held in the library collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, SFMOMA, and the International Center of Photography.
