Edited by Andrea Andersson with Jordan Amirkhani
SIGN-IN opens with a “Glossary of Terms” related to the places, themes, and materials that formed the artist’s work. These include locations she lived and performed, including 10 Chatham Square and 112 Greene Street, as well as more theoretical concepts such as “camouflage,” which “linked her dual commitments to natural landscapes and patterns and revealed her fascination with disguise, masks, and veils.” The glossary doubles as a chronology of sorts, taking us through the artist’s multimedia practice spanning her time in the downtown New York arts scene, her home state of Louisiana, and studio location in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This hefty first monograph (nearly four-hundred pages) on the experimental artist, who passed away in 2020, utilizes this collage aesthetic throughout, splicing together pages from her notebooks and performance notes (without source captions until you find the loose insert stuck between the pages), contact sheets documenting her performances, and scholarly essays by Andrea Andersson, Pamela M. Lee, and Aruna D’Souza, among others. Consuming the book offers a much-needed deep dive into Tina Girouard that rewards opening at random, quick flipping, and slow reading. PS—open the dust jacket to discover another wonderful facsimile reproduction!
Essays by Aruna D’Souza, Jordan Amirkhani, and Pamela M. Lee round out the volume, which includes an opening abecedarium detailing the important sites Girouard helped establish, and a poignant introduction by Andersson that positions Girouard’s “memory maps” as both sigil and guide. Readers of this invaluable text can use these maps, and the rich ephemera of Girouard’s life and practice, to do what the artist herself had done from the very beginning: find a way to keep going forward with a strong sense of where we’ve come from.