Benjamin Lord

I made my first artist books when I was eleven, using my dad’s company’s Xerox machine after hours, and sold them door to door on weekends. Four decades later, my print practice encompasses a wide range of subjects, communities, and materials, but the core idea has in some ways remained the same: to experiment and to express my experience of the world with a maximum of independence, rigor, and integrity. My artist books are in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Benjamin Lord, Snow Dictionary, Self, 2024, © Benjamin Lord

The cover of "Snow Dictionary".

Snow Dictionary is a collection of all of the English words for ice and snow. Formatted in the style of a dictionary, complete with pronunciations and etymologies, it includes ancient words that are as old as English itself, alongside words of recent coinage. It's a miniature book, designed to be tucked into unexpected places, or slipped into a pocket.

2024. 2.375 x 3". 178 pages. Signature-sewn hardcover, white cloth cover with blind emboss. Interior pages printed on rice paper. Edition of 500.

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Benjamin Lord, Snow Dictionary, Self, 2024, © Benjamin Lord

interior spread from Snow Dictionary

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Over nine spreads, the book Tic Tac Toe (2024) depicts every possible state of play of the ancient game. The first spread is mostly empty, and contains each of the three moves possible on the first turn: the center, a corner and a side. The subsequent spreads depict a progressive ballooning of possible combinations which then settles back down to smaller quantities in the final turns of the game. Paging through the book, the reader has the overwhelming experience of playing every possible game at once. Too dense and complex to be sketched out reliably by pencil and paper calculations (I tried!), yet just simple enough to be easily visually apprehended when presented in a grid, the finite combinations of each turn were calculated by brute force using a simple computer script.

Tic Tac Toe is similar to some of my other recent works, like Lifey (2016) and Dissection of the Square (2024), in that it harnesses the notion of transcendent mathematical certainty, not as a logical proof but as a cognitive experience. Each of these pieces in a different way exhaustively documents the interior space of a narrowly defined problem, a space that turns out to be surprisingly roomy, exposing a surfeit of variety within a straitjacket of constraint.

2024. 9.75 x 13.75". 20 pages. Signature sewn hardcover. Tan linen cloth with black foil stamped cover. Interior pages printed on rice paper. Edition of 100.

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