Fly Paper Book

Fly Paper Book 2003 eMediaLoft NYC $15 ( $25 signed)ISBN 0-9728260-0-9 2-1/2x5-1/4, 8 pages, hand-made and ink-jet, metal ring bound, double-sided ink-jet prints and laminated fly paper strips with real flies.Barbara Rosenthal has often been known to use trompe loeil imagery in her works, but this is the first book into which she has bound actual objects. Real strips of fly paper, covered by thousands of flies that infested her studio one summer, have been laminated and cut to serve as pages interleaved with scans and print-outs of other strips. Many of Rosenthals works are concerned with how human beings have manipulated plants and animals, and this book is one of her most disconcerting. That summer I was stuck, I was trapped, I wasnt working much. I was horrified when I saw swarm after swarm of these determined creatures mating and geborning, maggots writhing daily in damp hiding places, the very air abuzz. In grief I resigned myself and hung fly paper strips after finding it impossible to chase them out the windows, unable to reconcile myself to sharing. I witnessed their suffering, and identified with their entrapment. I could not bring myself to discard them, and thus, by moving me to create this book, their demise was my salvation.