Wax House of Wax

Wax House of Wax gathers Matt Borruso's collages of old horror-film stills, found objects, and his own sculptures into a single volume, extending the visual logic of his 2014 gallery show of the same name.

Across 112 pages, images are cut, redacted, and reoriented, their figures partly effaced and their seams left visible, then multiplied through mirrored reflections until the source material becomes nearly illegible. The book was self-published by Borruso's own imprint, Visible Publications, in an edition of 150, bound as a hardcover with a hand screen-printed cloth cover and hand-sewn binding.

Borruso, who lives and works in San Francisco, first presented the Wax House of Wax material at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in 2014; a review of that show described his method as Surrealist, manipulating banal imagery until the horror underneath becomes visible. The book functions as both documentation of that project and a freestanding object in its own right.