Justine Kurland, Bruce Kurland, poems by Lisa Jarnot, The Stick

The Stick

Justine Kurland, Bruce Kurland, poems by Lisa Jarnot

Publisher
TIS books
Year
2021
ISBN
9781943146307
Specifications
softbound with foil stamp and silver ink
19cm x 24cm
92 pages, 41 duotone images, 15 color plates

The Stick weaves together Justine Kurland’s latest series of searingly intimate black-and-white photographs with her late father Bruce Kurland’s still life paintings. The two bodies of work—punctuated by poems by Lisa Jarnot, a former lover of Bruce Kurland’s—enact a new kind of family album, full of strange relics and mercurial artistry that link father and daughter. Boarded-up windows, a pregnant dog, chewing gum vulvas, and a former partner’s strap-on are in conversation with Bruce Kurland’s surreal compositional inventions—flowering branches draped with strips of raw bacon, a ripe cleaved peach seemingly levitating against a blue wall, and dematerialized birds dangling in space. Seen in tandem, the photographs take on the dreamlike uncanniness of the paintings and the symbolism of the still lifes finds embodied sensuality in the photographs. Justine Kurland’s work in The Stick is the first she has published since selling her van four years ago and renouncing the road trips she is known for. This series unfolds across her apartment in New York City, her hometown of Fulton, New York, and her mother’s home in rural Virginia. Kurland invaginates fragments of this life with allusions to the work of Carolee Schneemann, Betty Tompkins, Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Emily Roysdon. Three of her father’s paintings—a diminutive portrait of himself wearing a pot as a hat, a likeness of Justine Kurland’s mother, and his final self-portrait before his death—appear in her work, linking disparate slices of life, spaces that are and were once called home, and notions of family across time and place.

More from TIS books

Spine Index, an archive of independent photobooks

FIND A
BOOK
/
If you leave this unticked you are logged out when you close the browser, or after 12 hours without activity. Cookies and privacy.
/
one year, or a range like 2015-2020
one or more, separated by commas
full or partial
a name, or design: / text: / edited: / translation: and a name

ARCHIVE

Loading…

PUBLISHER

#

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

V

W

X

Y

Z

ABOUT

The project

SpineIndex is an archive of independent books on photography and visual culture: photobooks, publications, design books and self-published editions — the kind of work that rarely makes it into bookshop windows or mainstream catalogues. It exists to document, connect, and keep visible a world of publishers, artists, and makers who operate outside conventional distribution. A living reference for anyone who takes this territory seriously — collectors, researchers, students, and the simply curious.

Images and rights

Covers, interior pages and descriptions are shown to introduce and identify the books, always crediting publisher, author and photographer and linking back to the publisher. We ask publishers for their permission, and we remove anything on request within 7 days. If you are a publisher, an author or a photographer and you want something changed or removed, write to info@spineindex.it.