Author Description

Since 1993, Chain has been publishing a yearly issue of work gathered loosely around a topic. The topic allows us to switch the editorial question that we ask each piece of work submitted from "is this a great piece of art" to "does this piece of art tell us something about the topic that we didn't already know." This makes Chain a little rougher around the edges, a little less aesthetically predictable. Within the frame of the topic, we tend to privilege mixed media and collaborative work and work by emerging or younger artists. This issue focuses on letters: Epistolary exchanges, alphabets, symbols, orthographies, archival finds, typographies, correspondences, lettrist hypergraphies, the letter of the law, fonts, emblems, handwriting, inscriptions, glyphs, gossip, notes, rebuses, phonetics, mesostics, acrostics, graphemes, anagrams, hypograms, scarlet, purloined, valentines, letters from camp, letters from the front, and more.