Album VII consists of hundreds of images culled from various books, magazines, and other publications. Coming from public sources, the pictures are grouped on each page formally, conceptually, and intuitively. Readers are invited to make their own associations between images and invent narratives through visual puns.

In this way, the images of Album VII begin to compose an extended narrative around various themes: embodiment and exposure; the love and fear of holes; and the fundamental aperture to the world granted to us by our bodies. Using imagery excised from published sources, these topics weave to form an “image bank” of our collective image world.

Sometimes humorous, sometimes bland, and sometimes devestating, this museum-without-walls of found photography becomes an open invitation to construct narratives about our experience by means of the visual material that surrounds us in the wide cultural environment.

Available from Art Metropole.

Luis Jacob is an artist and writer living in Toronto. One characteristic of his artistic practice is its focus on the social and cultural fields. He makes use of formats such as video, photography, performance, and actions in the public domain just as much as his work as author, teacher, and curator. The experimentation with forms for the creation of social interaction and participation plays a central role.

Recent exhibitions include: Animism, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen (Belgium); Dance with Camera, Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia); What a Wonderful World, 2009 Götborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Sweden); Images Recalled – Bilder auf Abruf, Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg (Germany); 7 pictures of Nothing Repeated Four Times, in Gratitude, Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg (Germany); If We Can’t Get it Together: Artists Rethinking the (Mal)function of Communities, The Powerplant (Toronto); The Order of Things, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Belgium); Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Art Gallery (UK); documenta12, (Kassel); and Luis Jacob: Habitat, Kunstverein in Hamburg (Germany).

Opening in March 2010, he will participate in the exhibition Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York).