Blueprint12

Youdhisthir Maharjan works with found materials and reclaimed text, engaging in laboriously repetitive and autopoietic processes—whether that be twisting newspaper into rope, methodically erasing all but certain words or letters from a book, obscuring a text with intricate patterns, cutting and re-aligning passages to form abstract shapes or highly repetitive printmaking. The artist treats books as readymade materials, where the author’s name, text, story, and information are irrelevant. The results are sculptural objects freed from the signifying purpose of words. Maharajan insists he doesn’t know the visual outcome of a page when he begins his process. “After a visit to numerous thrift stores, and sifting through a number of books, I pick them according to their title. That inspires the pattern, design, illustration, and the aesthetics. Then some pages speak to me, and some don’t,” he explains. His is an inquiry at the intersection of identity and anonymity, individual and collective, familiar and alien, that is invested in exploring the materiality of text.

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