In January 2024, publication of Natalie Czech's artist book to icon, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it, curated by Elfi Turpin.
2024
Texts by Jens Asthoff and Paul Stephens
Graphic design by Jean-Pascal Flavien
Published by CRAC Alsace and Spector Books
ISBN: 9783959052054
27 cm x 32 cm
107 pages
32 euros
Order online (Spector Books)
With To [Icon]—literally "Making an Image"—Czech scrutinises the computer icons that people our digital environment, pictograms she identifies on the surfaces of clothes and fashion accessories: on trench coats, jeans, overalls, shirts and backpacks that are themselves iconic. According to the apps in question these desktop metaphors—houses, pens, dials—take on different meanings that prompt different acts, and provide her with the different words that will make up a new poem. Thus she finds the blank page icon in the collar of the dress shirt she is photographing on the floor, accompanied by a label bearing the new poem generated by a list of the pictogram's assorted meanings: a Draft, a Blank Page, a Preview, an Artboard or just New. And that's how an image within an image produces a text then an image.
And that's how you reawaken dormant signs.
And that's how Natalie Czech writes.
—Elfi Turpin, May 2016.