Trying to Find the Ocean (*signed*)

Presentation from the author's website:

"Trying to Find the Ocean depicts a rampage-like journey through the city of Baltimore. Michael Ast incorporates both an intense outward gaze on the urban environment and its inhabitants, and an inward gaze, employing images to function esoterically as emotive and cognitive intimations. The sequencing reads at once like a cyclically entrapped day-in-the-life narrative, but also as a long visual poem.

In the afterword essay, author and artist Mark Alice Durant states, «For Michael Ast, Baltimore is a specific place and a site for exploring the way in which photographs map the territory between the real and the imagined.» The Ocean that the photographic adventure seeks is figurative, emblematic of hope, escape and redemption.

Between the book's cover runs an almost feral energy to find such desire. Rather than resulting in wishful thinking, a sense of reverent longing pervades as Ast explores the city’s terrain and social landscape. «Ast invents the world as he goes along, finding small moments and minor revelations,» Durant concludes in his essay, «that add up to an episodic collection of subtle dualities.» "

94 pages - Softcover

Self-published, 2014 (300 copies)

*Signed & Numbered*

New - Mint condition