Based on a project at Documenta 13, this publication presents new multimedia works by New York artist Seth Price (born 1973) that meditate on today’s material (fabric) culture. Folklore U.S. includes paintings on plywood, vacuum-formed rope paintings and cloth sculptures fabricated in NYC’s garment district.

New York–based artist Seth Price (born 1973) deploys a variety of media—sculpture, video and written text—to explore themes of cultural production and distribution of information through appropriation and repurposing. This compilation presents 120 of Price’s rarely seen preliminary sketches and drawings.

Social Synthetic is the first comprehensive publication on the varied oeuvre of Seth Price (born 1973). How can art explore the self under technological pressure? In Price’s work, this is often expressed in terms of the “skins” of surface, packaging and wrapping: he has made photographic studies of a person’s skin obtained through the technologies Google employs for mapping, vacuum-formed plastic reliefs presenting a body part stranded in plastic and large wall sculptures depicting the negative space between two people engaged in intimate action, greatly enlarged from a tiny internet jpeg. Price’s work offers a fascinating engagement with our technologically ...