X
X is a 126-page, section-sewn hardcover artist book with the poem By Gaze by Cody-Rose Clevidence. I conceived and photographed it, and co-designed the object with book artist Rory Sparks, who also bound the edition.
At 8.5 × 11 inches, the book brings together 80 photographs and nine poem plates, interleaved with reflective metallic-silver and handmade papers. Clevidence’s poem plates are handwritten in silver ink. The surface is integral to the book’s silver-on-black logic. Some images and text cannot be fully read straight on; the reader has to tilt the page until light catches it. The silver behaves like the flash itself: an image appears, disappears and changes according to where you stand.
The edition consists of 10 copies, 2 artist’s proofs and 2 special-edition collector’s box versions. Artist-published, Richmond, Virginia. Released 2026.
Copies for individuals and collections: write to pbthulin@vcu.edu
X began with music. Listening to Squarepusher’s Music Is Rotted One Note, I began asking what a “rotted note” might look like in landscape photography: what happens when a tradition built around clarity, beauty, depth and the commanding view is made to refuse those things.
The photographs were made in the overgrown river landscapes of Virginia that I have known since childhood. Working close and often with flash, I photograph without vista or clearing. Foreground and background become difficult to separate; things cross, obscure, absorb and reorganize one another.
I became interested in wildness not as untouched wilderness, but as a condition that exceeds the systems imposed on it: cultivated and uncultivated, useful and useless, subject and background. The camera does not stand apart from the landscape and explain it; it becomes caught in the same density.
That thinking led me to Cody-Rose Clevidence, whose language accumulates, collides and remains unresolved rather than explaining its subject. In the book, poem and photograph are placed as kin rather than caption. An X is a crossing: two things meet at an angle and become legible through encounter. The physical book asks the reader to approach the image at an angle as well.
We often call beautiful what we already understand; these pictures stay with what resists understanding, with the tangle that will outlive the logics we lay over the world.
Cody-Rose Clevidence is a poet and a longtime creative partner. Their books include This Household of Earthly Nature (Roof Books, 2025), Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018) and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta, 2014).
Rory Sparks, book artist, co-designed the object and bound it. Sparks also made the Isla de Las Palmas Collector's Edition and the 100 Yrs boxes with me.
