Bon Voyage

Bon Voyage, an artist’s book by Irit Hemmo, gleans its images from a holiday guide book featuring accommodations and cruise ships, and from a cattle selection guide. The guides offer no instructions, but rather a very limited selection of items. Planning a trip with a guide like this means forgoing whatever is not included in it. Like guide-book users, Hemmo chooses images. She copies them with carbon paper, following the original meticulously, almost blindly. The light touch needed is a reminder of the difference between the nearly lost art of carbon-copying, and reproduction. In the process of drawing, Hemmo forges a balance of power with the expropriated images and even with the carbon paper, which (precisely because of its delicacy) always threatens to leave unsightly smudges.