Sarsaparilla to Sorcery, an artist’s book by Jeff Gibson, pairs open-ended, abstract photographic images with pages torn from encyclopedias from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The abstract images—shot with a macro lens, but otherwise unmanipulated—depict various light sources and textured surfaces distorted by colored gels. Though none of the elements are recognizable, the images are highly allusive. By contrast, the appropriated pages present various groupings of natural and cultural material and phenomena, whose meanings are comparatively fixed by virtue of their taxonomic organization. With each of the juxtapositions (the book comprises thirty such double-spreads) there is a formal correspondence—in terms of color, composition, and/or texture—that sparks a process of mutual inflection: The abstract images take on curiously representational qualities in relation to the adjacent encyclopedia images, while the specificity of the encyclopedia images is somewhat undone by their visual correlation with the abstract images. The spreads therefore serve as cues to interpretation and its dissolution, bridging the book’s polarized registers of fixity and fluidity.

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