Narcolepsy
Max Pam and Bob Charles
T & G Publishing
English
Hardcover
Edition 709
144 pages
210 x 250 mm
2012
ISBN 9780987305008
Narcolepsy is a disturbingly ambiguous novella in pictures and words by Max Pam (photographer) and Bob Charles (writer). A collision between image and text, it is a journey into a terrain where pathology meets boredom, where horror meets melancholic loss, and where the will to live meets a grossly heavy impulse to self-erasure. The book functions as a groundbreaking exemplar for how research can occur in a fully creative arena and capacity. This work is new take on writing and photography and what kind of narrative/creative possibilities they deliver. Bob Charles has created a fictional novella that effectively channels the energy of Pam’s works.
Pam, in turn, responded to the writing with dream-like drawings and together both artists found themselves in the midst of an intense creative partnership of an amazing visionary potential unlike anything they had experienced before. In this process they discovered that this call and response type of dialogue is the key driving aspect of the project. The work is innovative and novel because it confuses both word and text and, in effect, creates a new genre.
Narcolepsy radically delivers a process that shakes-up the form of the book to produce the art as book and the book as art. The book is a fully realised graphic vehicle. The ways in which the book operates as a series of closures and openings, also parallels the content of the book and amplifies it as an evocative, mysterious object. Narcolepsy is loaded with the poetics of sex and death realized through an exciting fusion of drawing, painting, text and photography.
About the Artist
Max Pam is passionate about life, travel and photography — for him they are inseparable. Travel has been the catalyst for the creation of his compelling images since the 1960s and the images he has produced providing an intimate journal of his life. As a teenager Pam found post-war suburban Melbourne grim, oppressive and culturally isolated. He found refuge in the counter-culture of surfing and the imagery of National Geographic and Surfer magazine and became determined to travel overseas.
maxpam.com
Bob Charles is an animator he graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in General Fine Arts and in 2010 and got his Masters in Art Education. Charles substitute taught art to students from Kindergarten through High School for 3 years until he got accepted into Gobelin’s Summer Animation Program.
bobcharlesart.com
About the Publisher
Australian-based award winning T&G Publishing specialises in establishing a creative dialogue with the acclaimed photographers they publish. Using the finest design and most advanced printing practices, T&G are committed to showcasing elite photographic art.
tgpublishing.com
