Shana Agid, Rind Press, Brooklyn, NY

Artist's Resume

Books—

Snitch, 2006
It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This, 2004

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Snitch, 2006

edition of 20, 8 x 9-1/2 inches, 28 pages

Snitch is a pop-up book about surveillance. More specifically, it is about the ways people talk about it and how. This continues even as many people resist some forms of surveillance. We help it operate every day. While the explosion of new surveillance in recent years is daunting, this book focuses on long-standing, common-sense ideas about what we should be afraid of, and how that helps sell the idea that expected forms of surveillance make us safer. The US relies not only on technologies of surveillance, but a language of fear and paranoia used by police, politicians, and many of us to target specific people and groups—people of color, the poor, immigrants, people under the control of prison and parole systems, the homeless, queer people, and others. Snitch proposes that recent efforts to widen the surveillance net don’t necessarily mean a change in its ultimate targets. In the end, surveillance disappears people in the name of making us safer.

Snitch includes digital printing and screenprinting on Gallery100. Digital prints were made with an Epson Photo 2200. Screenprinting was done in oil-based inks at The W.O.R.K.S. in Vallejo, California. Concept, photographs, manipulation, text collection, paper engineering, and screenprinting by Shana Agid, Rind Press, 2004.

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It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This, 2004

edition of 20, 5 1/2 x 5-1/2 inches, 20 pages

It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This combines text and woodcut images to tell a story of relationship to family history, national pasts, the artist’s transgender identity, and the liberal discourse on improvement. The book (and the installation it originally accompanied) seek to disrupt and question the trajectory of progress central to the mythology of the United States and to inter-generational desires for getting “better.”

It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This was letterpress printed from polymer plates on Stonehenge at the California College of the Arts printshop. The illustrations, cover, and title page are from woodcuts by the author. This book was written, cut, printed, and bound by Shana Agid.

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