Reading Revolutionaries

Thursday, February 5, 2015
12:30-1:30 pm

Sicardi Gallery hosts a conversation between Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, on the occasion of the publication of Reading Revolutionaries. The book, published in January 2015, proposes an alternative reading of Sparagana's work Crowds & Powder: The Revolutionaries, by translating it into the format of a mass-market paperback. Arranged over eighty double-page spreads, each individual page frames a full-scale fragment of this work.

This small volume perpetuates Sparagana's manipulation of printed media and contributes to the ongoing study of the relationship between media and the arts. Not only does it allude to a growing discourse on the control and manipulation of visual narrative, as increasingly witnessed from political imagery to popular culture, but it also investigates the way we read and process (visual) language.

Reto Geiser is a designer and scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is the Gus Wortham Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture. A founding principal of the collaborative design practice MG&Co., Reto is developing spatial strategies in a range of scales from the book to the house, exploring the boundaries of design and research with a special focus on the intersections and overlaps between architecture, installation, textiles and typography.

John Sparagana is the Grace Christian Vietti Chair in Visual Arts, and Chair of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University. His work has been shown internationally, most recently with exhibitions in Berlin, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Zürich, and is included in the collections of the The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, among others.