Category: Remediated Texts, Books & Editions

and yet and yet and yet
Hand bound book, 635 pages, digital print
9.25 x 6 inches
Edition of 4 + 2 AP

A remediated text poem derived from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things installed at The Storefront, Saskatoon.

hold together / all the traces [The Death of the Author], 2016
Hand bound book, 7 pages, serigraph on
acid free & archival cotton paper
9 x 8 inches
Varied Edition of 5 + 1 AP

The same as the shape of an object [Specific Objects], 2016
hand-bound book, 28 pages, offset and digital print

The text in this book is derived from Donald Judd’s essay, “Specific Objects,” first published in 1965. Each paragraph of the original essay has been transposed to a single page and unused sections of text removed to reveal a composition of words and phrases. This work fits within a larger series of remediated text works I’ve produced from historically-significant texts about art. This book has been created with the support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board. I am grateful for their support.

Troy Gronsdahl, the fact that they are not / insisted / reveal something [Art and Objecthood]

42 letterpress sheets, cloth-bound hardcover case with metallic foil print

2014-2015

As part of an ongoing series of text-based works, I have transformed historically significant texts about art through a process of remediation to create new forms. Stripping the source material of its semantic integrity, my texts are deliberately ambiguous, contradictory, and indeterminate. I aim to challenge the primacy of the text while pointing to the contingency of knowledge through artistic play.

Using a subjective method based on free association and the rhythm of language, I select phrases and words from the source material to create new forms. The unused sections of text are removed to reveal a composition of words and phrases distributed on the page. I strictly adhere to the original word order and do not make further amendments to the the organization of the words. The spaces between are as important as the words themselves; what is removed thus activates the composition and creates a critical resonance integral to the work.

Make way for magic!, 2012-2015
Hard cover book, cloth bound with silver foil stamp
40 letterpress sheets with black end sheets
7.5 x 5 inches
Edition of 1

Make way for objective mysteries!, 2012-2015
Hard cover book, cloth bound with silver foil stamp
40 letterpress sheets with black end sheets
7.5 x 5 inches
Edition of 1

Troy Gronsdahl, Correspond closely to the rectangle (Specific Objects), 2014
Installation view, photo credit: Scott Massey

“’In its present shape it is not the only possible world.’” (Critical black)
Stone lithograph on paper, 2014
Variable edition

Text and title from Paul Klee, On Modern Art, a lecture delivered in 1924, first published in 1945 and compiled in Modern Artists On Art: Ten Unabridged Essays edited by Robert L. Herbert 1964.

True and Not True are a pair of laser etched prints that take playful liberty with the notion of artistic truth. Based on the colloquial definition of “true” as absolute perpendicular or vertical as may be measured by a plumb, I prepared two paper works that are, in a matter of speaking, true and not true. Using graphics software, I prepared a version of “true” – a perfectly perpendicular line etched on paper with laser accuracy. I also prepared a version that is “not true” by rotating the line half a degree out of perpendicular.