FISH OUT of WATER
FISH OUT of WATER, 2023 is a large-format graphic short story, memoir style, in ten frames. Tells the story about a fish I had to carry home alive in a bag with no water and the stares I got on the streetcar home. We were both fishes out of water. Edition of 20.
MEDIUM AND SIZE:
Digital watercolor drawings, hand lettering, book arts on Legion Somerset Satin (cover) and Fabriano Rosapina (pages) printmaking papers. Inkjet printed with archival pigment inks and hand bound.
14.5" x 20.38" x 1/8" thick [36.8cm x 51.77cm x 0.32cm thick]
Funded in part with a 2023 Member Project Grant from the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective.
Excerpt from Devin Fitzgerald's Book Review, Lecturer in the Department of History and Associate Research Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, February 2024:
... If we judge artist books by what they make us feel and think, this book is a triumph. It is also a material object par-excellence. At first, it echoes a graphic novel. But its enormous format, the choices of color in the thread, and its material qualities force a different sort of engagement. Each page is a point of movement through the waters of the narrative. We travel with her family to the market. We feel the eyes of the bus. We fall in love with the flopping fish. The size of the book provides sensory immersion, and for those of us who know Chinatowns, buses, smells of ginger, and killing fish at home, the illustrations quickly become Proustian madelines summoning dormant histories.
“I never ate the fish.” And the next week, on repeat, a small image shows her family returning to the market.
In her refusal to consume, Irene restores dignity to the fish with a mute protest. Rituals in families, and in societies more broadly, construct our worlds. Rituals are also routinely places where different forms of violence are practiced. Can you see the difference between us (not fish) and them (fish)? While we celebrate food as culture, in many cultures, food is where we first encounter death. Fish out of Water juxtaposes lives with deaths; immigrants with racist gazes; and consumption with empathy. It is a human story, but given the grandeur of Irene’s achievement, it brings us on a journey any steelhead would envy. That is, assuming the trout decided to leave its stream to undergo a transformation in the worlds between East Asia and North America. Reading this, you may discover you too are a different sort of fish.