Moving Parts Press ~ California

Moving Parts Press ~ California

Codex Espangliensis:
From Columbus to the Border Patrol

A collaborative bookwork composed of performance texts and poems by Guillermo Gómez-Peña interwoven with collage imagery by Enrique Chagoya and rendered into book form by Felicia Rice. This monumental bookwork chronicles and confronts the realities and surrealities of border culture at the turn of the millennium. Collage images are examples of graphic art from pre-Hispanic times to present-day Mexico juxtaposed to traditions of Western art and contemporary American pop culture. The series of performance texts and poems are selected from the writer's works over his twenty-year career.

Jennifer González, Assistant Professor of Art History at UC Santa Cruz describes the work as: "A rich unfolding of colonial conquest, cultural genocide and linguistic admixtures that have formed the Americas . . . [T]he Codex offers a critical analysis of a border politics through a density of historical references, icons of popular culture and masterful typographic compositions that orchestrate the many voices in the text." The book was inspired by pre-Hispanic codices from Central America and printed on thick, deeply-embossed, Mexican bark paper. Following the form of original codices, the accordion structure unfolds, in this case, to thirty-one feet in length, creating "a monumental space for the reader to inhabit." González's critical commentary is included in an informative sixteen-page companion pamphlet that also features commentary about the work and the working process from each of the artist's involved.

Letterpress printed in black and dark red inks from a variety of digital and handset type and from zinc photo engravings on Amatl paper lined with Shintengujo tissue. Accordion bound. Housed in Shiho chitsu-style, wrap-around portfolio box covered in Amatl and Canapetta black book cloth. Signed, numbered edition of 50. (9.5 x 12 inches boxed; 15 full-spread panels). 1998. Complex and richly rendered. A substantial accomplishment that was five years in the making. Only a few copies remain.
$3600

Page spread from Codex Expangliensis, Moving Parts Press.

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