A Man Full of Trouble

A Man Full of Trouble takes its title from a pre-Revolutionary tavern still standing in Philadelphia's historic district, and turns an archaeological hole in the ground into a method for making a book.

Published by Karma, New York, in an edition of 750, the volume runs to 328 pages at 11 by 8 1/4 inches and is carried almost entirely by colour images. Da Corte uses the tavern's privy, the excavated pit where three centuries of discarded objects settled together, as the organising conceit: a portal in which memories, props, past and present aggregate and reconstitute. The result reads as an inventory of the artist's working vocabulary, the household goods, prosthetics, fluorescent surfaces and film-set fragments that recur across his installations, photographed and sequenced rather than explained. Karma also issued a special edition alongside the trade printing.

Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, New Jersey) lives and works in Philadelphia, and his practice runs from video and neon-lit environments to sculpture assembled from consumer packaging. His other books include Slow Graffiti for the Vienna Secession, C-A-T Spells Murder and Marigolds with Karma, and Free Roses with MASS MoCA.