5ive Times Floyd

Published by the synaesthesia press. Colophon dated 2022; completed and issued in 2024 to coincide with the exhibition 5ive Times Floyd at These Days LA Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist’s book. Narrow octavo (approximately 5¼ × 11¼ inches; 13.3 × 28.6 cm). Hand-sewn in printed wrappers; unpaginated. Letterpress, collage, and found imagery throughout. Printed in multiple colors on a variety of paper stocks.

Edition of 50 copies (40 hand-sewn in wrappers; 10 bound in cloth).

The cloth edition was housed in a custom chipboard slipcase printed and blind-embossed with the title and an image of heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson.

5ive Times Floyd began with the discovery of an original publicity photograph of Floyd Patterson found in a box of miscellaneous ephemera at a Southern California flea market. That image became the catalyst for a larger body of work incorporating found photography, collage, letterpress printing, vernacular imagery, and collected materials.

Drawing inspiration from Joseph Cornell’s Manual of Marvels, as well as the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Wallace Berman, the project developed simultaneously as both book and exhibition. The publication transforms found materials into a sequence of visual assemblages while exploring memory, popular culture, celebrity, and the afterlife of printed images.

The completed project ultimately expanded beyond the book itself. Five large-scale paintings, each approximately 2 by 4 feet and incorporating many of the same visual elements found in the publication, were exhibited as part of 5ive Times Floyd at These Days LA Gallery in Los Angeles. Rather than serving as documentation of the exhibition, the book and paintings evolved together from the same source material.

Design, printing, and binding by Jim Camp.

Availability: Cloth edition out of print. Limited quantities of the wrappered edition remain available from the publisher.