By Tony Cokes
15 silk screened loose sheets, 8.5 x 11 in
in die-cut screen-printed folder
Edition of 100
Design by Tony Cokes and Elana Schlenker
Image Text Ithaca Press, 2016
The Black Banal, a limited edition, hand silk-screened portfolio that comes in both purple and yellow, is a graphic blast of found text sourced and sequenced by Tony Cokes. Cokes channels the intense boredom and extreme anger generated by his encounter with the source material into an act of “minor deconstruction.” The fact that race was rendered marginal, and banal, in its original reading context makes the excerpts more resonant, intriguing in their isolation, producing new, broader connections in a different place and time.
