DESCRIPTION
A vibrant meditation on flags, this massive 20-page screen-printed artists’ book sets the landscape and setting for expansive critical discourse. Flags are paradoxically used as both markers of the internal cohesion of nation or tribe, and also as external proclamations of transformation and utopia. It is this tension that binds this book together. Beginning with MacPhee’s illustrations of flags stacking beneath, piling on, and wrapping around each other, these images become increasingly convoluted and unclear as the pages turn. For the tail end of the book, Purcell works his more playful imagery and textures into the fields of flags, meeting in a middle where all this imagery begins to conflict, contest, and even consume itself.