Iowa City: Dave Dugan, 2018. First edition, no. 10 of 27 copies. 36 numbered handmade sheets, ~15-1/2 x 9-1/2 in, intaglio and letterpress printed to rectos only; with 11 x 7-3/8 title card. Some warping to the leaves (owing presumably to variations in thickness of the pulp during forming), else fine. Wrapped in large sheet of hand-made wastepaper secured with blue painter's tape, and housed in a Golden Phoenix-brand Thai Jasmine Rice bag.
A tongue-in-cheek narrative artist's book concerning a painter, Dorothy, who is sued for depicting characters from The Smurfs in her work, retreats into a world of abstract pictorial language, and dies an unrecognized outsider visionary. Dugan, an Iowa-based cartoonist, printer, and papermaker long associated with the Iowa City Press Co-Op, where the present work was produced, is noted for his creative reuse of discarded materials—for instance, as here, using acrylic sheets as intaglio plates, and producing his own paper out of junk mail, bags, and other paper scraps. Though Dugan intended to house the full edition of Triptych in wooden boxes made from old fence slats, only a handful of copies received this treatment; the rest, including the present copy, being housed unceremoniously in reused rice bags. A delightful, pun-laced mashup of pop culture and art history, full of its own striking imagery; unrepresented in OCLC.
