Karen Azoulay | Down With Liberty

Karen Azoulay

Down With Liberty

Toronto, Canada: The Nothing Else Press, 2013

218 pp., 18 x 18 x 2 cm., clothbound

Edition of 15 signed and numbered copies

Many, many years ago we were enjoying backyard drinks with Karen Azoulay, and she began recounting her fascination and fear of the Statue of Liberty, which was made all the more interesting given that she had moved from Toronto to New York only a few years prior. She added that she was collecting images of the tower being destroyed in pop culture, almost as immersion therapy. 

The ending of the original Planet of the Apes remains the classic example, but pulp science fiction and comic books predate that image, and subsequently it has almost become shorthand in disaster films for the city under siege. 

Down With Liberty is a three-thousand word account of the statue and the artist's fraught relationship with it. Following this are 200 images of the monument meeting its demise in film stills, video game screengrabs, scenes from comics, cartoons, and television series. 

The book is available in a limited edition of 15 signed and numbered copies, each with a unique hand-painted cover and collaged postcard.

The work has also been presented as a narrated slide show at Deitch Projects in New York, Concordia University in Montreal and TPW in Toronto.