Karmic Readings are visual poems based on an archive of printed matter I’ve amassed in the studio—old encyclopedias, magazines, auction catalogs, etc.—going back to the early 19th century. Some of the materials have deep personal meaning from my family’s history, while others are of more general interest.

I use chance methods to select little bits of text from the archive and place them together on the page to see what they might suggest to us. I believe that every bit of text contains the DNA of its time and place, and that we can learn about how the karmic engine of the world in our own time is operating from these surprising juxtapositions.

Here’s where the texts in this karmic reading come from:

Modern Real Estate Practices in Pennsylvania (5th ed.), ed. Herbert Bellairs, et al., Real Estate Education Co. (1989).

Reading for Fun for Boys and Girls in Elementary School, ed. Eloise Ramsey, National Council of Teachers of English (1937).

The American People, by David S. Muzzey, Ginn & Co. (1927).

The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate, Harper & Brothers (1872)

Visual poem

5” x 7”

Sumi ink, rubber stamp, burn marks made with an incense stick, and text scraps from printed matter in our Karmic Readings Archive.

$20 / $30 matted to 8”x10”