Alison Knowles | Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

Alison Knowles

Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

New York City USA: Printed Editions, 1980

[unpaginated], 21 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

A book of poetry and images produced by the original xerox machine at the Rochester School of Visual Studies. The objects and words are “found.” The title is dedicated to Dick Higgins, to whom Knowles was married for ten years, divorced for ten and then remarried again for the final decade of his life. 

"The project developed from VSW's invitation to work with the old Haloid-Xerox equipment. The objects | worked with were a battery pack and a hydraulic can top. These objects went through various voltage, time and size changes over an intense three-day period. The content of the work is the effect of dark and light on the two objects, achieved by manipulating the slow process of the original Haloid-Xerox copy machine. | am also interested in the ways of nature. The fog and light forms the copier produced and the grainy texture made a nice background to float the nature clips about birds and frogs and about my father and me raising chickens. This text runs along the bottom. So, the content would be a collage of meanings including the diary and the nature inserts in an imaginary landscape of pages. You could call the hydraulic can top and the battery pack performers in the book. A small circle and lines on each print became like a moon with scattered clouds. These turned out to be simply scratches on the plate and added a great deal to the final image in my opinion. This original Xerox machine reminds me of the early mainframe computers that would fill a room like a small car! These early versions of tools we have come to depend on were far more interesting in their original forms, now completely unavailable. For example, the Haloid’s processor made it possible to manipulate the image, to draw right into it with an electrostatic wand and actually move the toner around on the plate. In the case of Natural Assemblages and the True Crow, areas of chiaroscuro and bright light could be designed by the performer (artist). The speed of Xerox machines today wipes out the possibility of manipulating within the process. This concept relates to all my work—the desire to catch the moment in the process and change it."

—Alison Knowles