“Comedy Tragedy is an omnibus of methods for invention and image processing—absurd, repetitive, hand drawn, found and messed up. In Feyrer’s world a wig is a mountain not a molehill, bananas are a glove’s fingers, clothes are shadows of body parts and a pizza is a face is a fruit is a slice of the earth. Set out as an eccentric collector’s catalogue this compendium overturns the story and the history. Structure is the subject, funny and fun.”
-from Perro Verlag website
Assembled by drawing, tracing, scanning, re-ordering, editing, condensing, cutting and pasting, this book attempts to confuse the variety of methods used to achieve the end result. Each image is compressed and distorted into a black and white bitmap, the most primitive yet smallest, most efficient image algorithm. Every two page spread is designed to showcase its contents in a obscured array of disconnected objects and effects. Compositional oppositions play off each other as the title “Comedy Tragedy” suggests, yet the accumulative results cancel each other out, leaving a neutral zone of contradictions for the reader to fill in their own meanings.
Published by Perro Verlag
ISBN 978-1-897243-57-2
20×14 cm56 pages, black and white, 2009
Edition of 75
$12.00CAD
Available from Perro Verlag
About Julia Feyrer
I have been making artist books and zines since I was 10 years old. The accessibility of a photocopier always presented the perfect method for cataloguing and editing my drawings and sketchbooks into a compact and easily distributed form. During my studies at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver I continued this practice and developed it by co-editing more official magazine like publications such as Woo, and U.E. Magazine. This latest book has developed out of a ongoing relationship with Perro Verlag, after completion of a smaller book as part of the Hell Passport series. My ongoing interest in drawing is an attempt to sketch, then distort and subvert the subject matter I am trying to depict in a series of unpredictable successions; each drawing structured only by the overall linear progression of the book form.
Born in Victoria BC, Julia lives in Vancouver and sometimes attends the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. Past activities have included drumming and artwork for the band They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, co-editor of the Audiozine SPOOX and author of Comedy Tragedy an artist book published by Perro Verlag in 2009. Currently her practice is divided between painting and drawing, and the more collaborative efforts of 16mm filmmaking, such as Untitled (Sicily Film), Aula, and The Poodle Dog Ornamental Bar.
Perro Verlag Books by Artists publishes visual art chapbooks, comix, manifestos, Documents of Psychic Amateurs, research from The Institute for the Science of Identity, The Hell Passport Project , pamphlets from the lowercase reading room and exhibition catalogues. We promote the original and independent voices of both established and emerging artists whose work combines or crosses or messes up traditional genres. We currently have forty-five titles in print.