Title: Fate Shifts Shapes
Artist: Nicholas Muellner
Additional contributor: Anzhelina Polonskaya, Sasha Rudensky, Clemens von Wedemeyer
Designer: Elana Schlenker
Editor: Melissa Catanese and Nicholas Muellner
Imprint: Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Spaces Corners (co-published)
Printer: Shapco, Minneapolis, MN
Publication date and place: September, 2016 / Philadelphia & Pittsburgh, USA
Edition: 240
Format, binding: softcover; saddle-stitched / duplexed luminaire cloth with reflective foil-stamp
Size: 15 x 22 cm
Number of pages and images: 36 pages plus 6 gatefolds / 23 images
Type of printing and paper: digital offset / GPA 100# matte coated
Retail price: $27
Book Description:
Fate Shifts Shapes folds the viewer into a darkly obscure, emotionally charged encounter with contemporary Russian experience. This catalog-as-artist’s book adapts works by Nicholas Muellner, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Sasha Rudensky and Clemens von Wedemeyer into a fluid sequence of images and poems that obscure and reveal one another. Collectively, they dramatize the ways some vulnerable individuals – particularly women, gay men and economic migrants – must shape their identities around the inexorable social and cultural forces of a conservative society.
Fate excludes rationalism in favour of destiny. Accordingly, this book rejects documentary realism to theatrically present individuals acting on and submitting to the demands of providence. Fate Shifts Shapes embraces extravagance, glamour, melancholy and tragedy to relay these quintessentially Russian dramas.
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: Fate Shifts Shapes