Kirjahaku

The most comprehensive book to date on the innovative multimedia artist Doug Aitken. Defying definitions of genre, Doug Aitken has explored every medium, from architecture and film to installations and interventions. While Aitken’s work varies in both theme and context, his installations share a common thread in their ability to use technology to evoke meaningful personal reactions from the viewer, encourage audience interaction, and inspire communal gatherings. His films often explore themes of displacement and temporality, and through his keen awareness of motion, sound, and color he creates dreamlike landscapes and the futurist aesthetic for which he has become known. This beautifully designed book features visual essays by the artist and surveys his work in all mediums. The monograph is organized thematically into the four most prevalent ideas connected with his work, inspires thought, and will leave readers examining their own relationship to the world around them.

With numerous special printing features, this luxurious accordion-fold volume documents and embodies Aitken's exploration of mirrored surfaces in architectureA site-specific installation successively exhibited in the California desert outside Palm Springs, a defunct Detroit bank and the Alpine landscape of Gstaad, LA/New York-based artist Doug Aitken's (born 1968) Mirage is inspired by the ranch-style suburban American house and is entirely composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. A visual echo-chamber, its mirrored surfaces form a life-size kaleidoscope that absorbs and reflects the landscape. Dedicated to the three iterations of the Mirage, this publication offers the reader an experiential book that shares some of the characteristics of the installation: the immersive emotion, the disrupted perception, the merging of the viewer and the landscape. The book gathers previously unpublished photo-documentation on the installations, plus drawings and more. Featuring cold foils, special inks, silver printing and bound accordion-style to reflect the mirror-like quality of Mirage, this limited edition, copublished with Zolo Press, is certain to soon become a collectible item.