Paradise Found

An artist's book by the Los Angeles artist Devin Troy Strother with the designer Yuri Ogita, Paradise Found answers a found book with an act of reauthorship, examining who owns an image and who gets pictured in it.

The book responds to Lost Paradise, by the artist Žiga Kariž and designer Vasja Cenčič, which compiled preexisting images without text or context. Strother and Ogita abstract those pages into new ones: unpeopled images are digitally filtered and painted over, some annotated with Strother's humor images of white figures have their hands and arms painted black and their faces superimposed with scans of hand-painted stickers from Strother's studio practice. The publisher describes this faux diversification as the artist — a Black man then living in Germany among a majority-white population — regaining a sense of ownership and altering a nameless book into something significant. Perfect-bound and digitally printed by Coloured Publishing, 2019, 138 pages.

Strother (b. 1986, West Covina, CA) works across painting, collage, sculpture, neon, and installation, citing Joseph Cornell and Matisse among his touchstones his work is held by LACMA, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and he co-runs Coloured Publishing, the imprint behind this volume.