Helen Mirra: Sky-Wreck (Renaissance Society, 2002)

ISBN: 0941548449
Published in conjunction with an exhibition that ran May 6 through June 24, 2001
Features text by Ben Marcus, Jen Bervin, and Hamza Walker
In plastic.

A hybrid of artist's book and catalogue designed in collaboration with the artist, this unique publication is divided into three separate books presented in a slipcase.

One features photographs of Sky-wreck, Mirra's conceptually multi-layered 2001 installation at the Renaissance Society, accompanied by an essay from Hamza Walker which explicates Sky-wreck's tangled mathematical, visual and poetic aspects, and how these interwoven forms of signification within the piece ultimately "question the ability for that which is unfathomable to assume representation."

Another section contains reproductions of Mirra's earlier work, with a meditation from a more personal standpoint by poet and friend of Mirra, Jen Bervin, with footnotes from Mirra herself.

The third section is an intensely beautiful collaboration between Mirra and experimental fiction writer Ben Marcus, juxtaposing Mirra's exquisite working drawings for Sky-wreck with Marcus's surreal poetic response to them, entitled A Horizon Grammar.