“From a motorcycle journey through Bali fleeing an erupting volcano, to traversing the jungle landscape of Indonesia by boat and bus from Surabaya to Java and Jakarta, flying over oil fields in Kuwait to two dawns and an evening in Qatar spent walking around aimlessly under a pomegranate sky, to visiting a sister and grandmother in Taiwan, riding scooters through pineapple fields and rainforests in Hawaii, going on countless hikes through the fire damaged regions of Ojai, driving from one coast to the other across the US, along with a multitude of trips throughout the Southwest, either in Navajo Nation, Apache County, or the numerous National Parks and Monuments strewn about the region; each image created tying back to the narrative strands that had begun to thread their way through my life last year: losing a lover after nearly half a decade, the fathers of both my parents coming close to death, one who I know intimately and another I only recently learned the name of, a desert rising within them while simultaneously throughout it all, I had begun to experience the petals of a new love like I’d never known. One life lost, two others rising, and another that had just rose.”

 Desert Rose, the latest artist book from Jason Jaworski, combines images created throughout the latter seasons of 2017, along with the most recent ones in 2018, from travels on both hemispheres across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

 The book’s design and construction were formed by the idea to combine physical elements from the artist’s recent travels, starting with the simple manila envelope that houses the book with the title written by hand in white charcoal, which is the same that triage centers in Bali handed out to persons to hold their passports stranded from the erupting Mt. Agung nearby. The book’s cover is a piece of transparent film meant to mimic a car window, each of which was sun baked in desert dirt over a week’s period whose fragments of earth are designed to dissolve and be pressed upon the pages of the book as each reader looks through it, displacing the dirt throughout the matte black pages and the 85 digital dry prints hand placed and tipped in by hand. In addition, a dehydrated rose petal from bouquets grown outside the artist’s studio adorns the first page, along with the title once again written by hand on top of film-based correction tape. As a further interactive element, the book contains a loose-leaf colophon insert, along with a “Rose Ticket” housed inside a coin envelop which readers can send in to receive a personalized mail art piece in the form of a textwork letter from the artist.

• Handmade artist book housed in an artist envelope with title written in white charcoal
• 5” x 6” / 52 Pages with loose-leaf colophon & envelope inserts
• 85 digital dry prints sequenced & tipped in by hand
• Heavy-weight transparent film cover sun baked in earth over a week’s period with embossed embellishments on back
• Dehydrated rose petal from bouquets grown outside the artist’s studio
• Unique “Rose Ticket” insert to be exchanged for personalized textwork letter from artist
• Triple rubber band binding
• Embossed, numbered & signed by the artist
• ISBN: 978-1-7322746-5-5
• First edition of 25 + 5 Aps

Jason Jaworski (b. 1987) is a writer, photographer and artist best known for his intimate portraits, sprawling textworks, large scale performance projects, and deeply personal artist books, all of which have been published and shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, along with having been performed privately to persons as wide ranging as Ringo Starr and Werner Herzog. His 2015 solo exhibition, Thinking Of You, was nominated for an ICP Infinity Award in the arts category, while an artist book he created to accompany the exhibition was chosen as one of the top ten photobooks of the year by 10x10 Photobooks. Recently, his artist book Inshallah was nominated for the 2017 MACK First Book Award. He also runs SSK Press.