NYC - "Dark Prospects" (05.17.08)

Dark Prospects
By Charles Beronio

Published by Printed Matter

Book Launch
Saturday, May 17, 2008, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to announce a launch for Charles Beronio’s Dark Prospects, an artist book taking the form of a tabloid magazine that breaks down and ultimately subverts the magazine’s personality and fields of corporate communication through a process of redaction. This is the latest installment in Printed Matter’s artists’ book publishing series. The launch will take place on Saturday, May 17, from 5:00 – 7:00 PM. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Street) in New York City.

Dark Prospects takes as its source material issues of People, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. While retaining the form of the magazine, the artist dismantles the medium’s visual language by blacking out all references to corporate branding, time (both textually and visually), textual references to location, and facial features of the magazines’ featured stars and advertising props. What’s left is an unforgiving and stuttering sequence of detonated images and textual fragments supporting a skewed visual narrative of lifestyle and politics—modern life stripped bare.

Dark Prospects is the latest installment in Printed Matter’s publishing series, which also includes titles by Angelblood, Kim Beck, Terence Koh, LTTR, Aleksandra Mir, the Reverend Jen, Adam Shecter, John Simon, Scott Treleaven, Temporary Services, and J. Meejin Yoon, among others.

Charles Beronio lives and works in Brooklyn. As an artist and writer, his practice includes a diverse range of work steeped in romantic conceptualism and allegorical formalism. His work utilizes a diverse range of familiar and common materials found in our consumer landscape and media-saturated world to reveal submerged meanings and narratives—challenging the trajectories of ideology and commerce. His work will be featured in upcoming exhibitions at the Bronx Museum and at the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco.

Dark Prospects is 68 pages and is printed in an edition of 1,000. It retails for $10 and can be purchased at Printed Matter’s storefront, or online at www.printedmatter.org.

Printed Matter, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists' books and other artists' publications.

Printed Matter, Inc. has received support, in part, through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Altria Group Inc, the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Gesso Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Schoenstadt Family Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and individuals worldwide.

Printed Matter, Inc.
195 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
T: 212 925 0325
F: 212 925 0464