Title: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why?
Artist: Dan Boardman & Aspen Mays
Additional contributor: Essay by Jeremy Haik
Designer: Elana Schlenker
Editor: Christina Labey
Imprint: Conveyor Editions / Houseboat Press
Printer: Jason Burstein, Conveyor Arts
Publication date and place: 2016 / United States
Edition: 500
Format, binding: Do-Si-Do Wire-O
Size: 21 x 26 cm
Number of pages and images: 206 Pages
Type of printing and paper: Indigo, Mohawk Superfine, Foil Stamp & Screenprinted Cover on Various Colorplan Papers
Retail price: $40
Book Description: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why? is a uniquely bound publication that brings together two sets of archives—one personal, one public—through a do-si-do inspired, double-loop bind, allowing each artist book to exist separately, while still bound together as one. Boardman and Mays employ the photographic archive as a device to draw connections between seemingly disparate storylines — an American road trip, the return of Halley’s Comet, and the Teacher in Space program, which invited the first civilian to leave the Earth.
On January 28th, 1986, these storylines unexpectedly coalesce at the launch of the ill-fated Challenger Mission STS-51-L, giving way to a set of parallel histories. In piecing together various archives — an album of family snapshots, glass plate negatives of the comet, photographs of the astronauts in training, video stills from the Lost Lessons, and various excerpts of official NASA documentation —Boardman and Mays explore the personal and cultural effects of bearing witness.
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why?