Baroque

“Beauty is an unstable force. It gathers mysteriously even out of its absence, beginning as a transparent sheen, little more than a certain perception of moisture. Out of ugliness even. Like a mold it grows, then like a moss; suddenly it’s covered in little petals. It coheres, burgeons, builds, drifts. Shapes form and pile, almost tumble, look as if to tumble, hold, tumble more; the mechanism is crystalline. It loves itself, beauty. It consists almost entirely of love of itself. It burgeons with the force of love of itself into a dozen, a hundred, a thousand petals, and the petals harden into facets, a thousand facets, facet upon facet, all glinting and flashing for one another, for the benefit of one another’s praise.”

Baroque is a collection of three essays exploring the arc between nature and artifice. The first essay, “On Nature Writing,” is a meditation on the rhythms of the natural world and its fundamental insusceptibility to the bonds of human language. “Doctrine of the Affections,” an essay in images, uses collage to juxtapose the natural and the built environment, photographic and painterly realities, the material present and the mirage of the historical. “Baroque” considers the decorative impulse as it pertains to the history of Western art and architecture as well as conceptions of female beauty, posing the question: What is really going on at the surface?

Baroque is the fourth in a series of artist books to be published by Holly Myers through then/and publications, after Road Noise, Wild Rough Country and Heidelberg. These works combine images and text to explore ideas, impressions and themes in their raw state. The series serves as a fluid compositional space, intuitive and exploratory rather than declarative, in which to reckon with the substance of contemporary life.