Stills
Stills is a call-and-response between the Belgian collage artist Katrien De Blauwer and the American composer Danny Clay, issued in 2016 as IIKKI 001, the debut release of the French label IIKKI, which pairs a visual artist with a musician for each of its book-and-vinyl editions.
Working independently over several months in 2016 from a shared set of prompts, De Blauwer and Clay never saw or heard each other's work in progress. Her 75 collages and his piano, voice, harmonium, and viola composition (with Paula Karolak, mastered by Taylor Deupree) converge on a shared mood of memory and disappearance. The collages splice figures, torn interiors, and sepia fragments recut from old magazines. The 112-page hardcover, designed by Sprflxgrfzm on Munken white stock with an embossed circle and slot, appeared in a first edition of 500 copies alongside a matching 500-copy LP, meant to be viewed and heard separately and together.
De Blauwer (b. 1969, Ronse, Belgium) calls herself a "photographer without a camera," building every image from cut and recombined found photographs. Stills was nominated for the Revelation Book Awards at La Maison Rouge, Paris, and stands among the clearest translations of her collage practice into collaborative, cross-media form.
