This Train
London: MACK, 2024.
ISBN: 9781915743299
Condition: As New
Signed and numbered
First Edition Leporello bound hardcover, embossed with 2 flaps and tipped-in image to front cover
25.3 x 18.3cm, 102 pages,
This new publication from Justine Kurland presents two interwoven narratives drawn from the road trips across the United States that she undertook with her young child between the years 2005 and 2010. The first thread is a sequence of arresting large-format photographs of her child and herself, disentangled from the renowned images of roads, trains, infrastructure, and fellow travelers Kurland was making at the same time. Revisiting these photographs, Kurland suggests a clarified reading of them as an anti-history of family and travel, upending the conventional family album to tell a story of queer motherhood and image-making in step with Kurland’s maternal line, for whom crossing the American landscape was a matter of dire necessity.
On the other side of this unspooling concertina publication are Kurland’s photographs of the railroads which traverse the American landscape. Deconstructing the familiar mythology of the railway as a pioneering symbol of modernity, these images observe the reality of the ways these routes carve and stain the landscape, often overwhelmed by surrounding nature, leaving behind barren strips of sun-stained asphalt and eerily perfect parallel tracks. Bookended by new texts from Constance Debré and Lily Cho, This Train treats the American landscape as the fabricated tableau that it is, a cultural fable which conceals histories of Chinese migrant labor and the human cost of freedom. Kurland re-appraises an interwoven set of paradigms which retain a tenacious grip on contemporary American life: the nuclear family, the open road, the violence of expansion, and the intractable force of the land itself.
Limited edition of 1,000 signed copies including a signed and numbered print handmade by the artist.
Especially for the event at Dashwood Books Kurland has curated and Dashwood has published a series of six limited edition zines with artists on the subject of Motherhood. Entitled The Mother zine series, they are printed in an edition of 100 copies, 20pp staple bound color zines sold with an obi band along with This Train exclusively available at the signing event on April 11th.
Mother zine series include: Family Table by Elizabeth Pedinotti Haynes, My Minky by Jacky Marshall,
(up)rooted by Qiana Mestrich, Ouroboros by Jacquelyne Pierson, env-IRON-ment by Júlia Pontés, and Origin by Gwen Smith. Item #27256
Out of stock
