We Already See So Much

Artist's book

This artist’s book is a collection of 85 landscape drawings and sketches by Euan Macdonald that were produced over a three year period in many parts of the world. In the small scenes, Macdonald reflects on the abstract and concrete forms of ordinary landscape phenomena, providing a strange synthesis of familiarity and contingency, which in turn provokes an uncertainty about the ordinary.

On Macdonald’s imagery, critic Ralph Rugoff says: “Macdonald quietly unsettles the viewers’ faith about what exactly is—or is not—happening in the picture he or she is looking at … These pockets of uncertainty are enhanced by Macdonald’s deliberately style-less or impersonal approach to making images.”

The book’s title comes from the last line of the short text “A Little Ramble” (1914) by the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956). A reprint of “A Little Ramble” (in the original German, and the English translation by Tom Whalen) is also included in the book as a detached insert.

Interspersed throughout the book are reproductions of 22 found Swiss postcards that were produced circa 1912—1915—in proximity to the same time and place where Walser wrote “A Little Ramble.” Each postcard image reflects a coincidental scene (within Walser’s text), producing a loose photographic narrative of the original text.

Published with Western Bridge, Seattle within the context of the Vancouver Special series, edited by Kathy Slade.