The facts:
Pacifico Silano
Shadow Cast
I saw a copy of Pacifico Silano’s Shadow Cast at Paris Photo this year. I was very impressed by both its content and its unique format.
From the press release:
Silano's reworking of queer archives enters a darkened space of reflection in a handmade, limited and oversized artist's book.
Our final release of the year is a uniquely ambitious artist's book from lens-based artist Pacifico Silano. Shadow Cast follows Silano's Aperture-nominated experimental Leporello hardcover I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, shifting focus to life-size, gritty headshots, obscured beyond recognition through rasterization and printing.
Known for his practice of excavating melancholy, tension, emotion, and friction from vintage gay pornography, Shadow Cast continues the artist's exploration of the dark interior of queer identity.
Printed entirely on the risograph and laden with ink, this oversized artist's book is corporeal in scale, blowing Silano's shadows up to life-size crops. Silano's conceptual gestures of reframing comment on marginality, with his subjects literally kept in the shadows, speaking of a mental hidden space pulsing with desire and longing.
Each page of Shadow Cast is individually risograph printed on one of only a handful of A2 risograph printers in Europe, then hand-assembled and stab-stitched with a thick PVC cover, transforming it into a covetable design object that elevates Silano's ephemeral approach into an experimental publishing gesture.
More information about the book is below.
