Paranoid Tiers, Griffin McPartland and Paul Urich

"This particular collection of Paranoid Tiers opens with From the Age of Affirmation and ends Engulfed in a Rainbow Light. In between are the uncanny word-picture combinations whose significances radiate in overlapping vectors. The sorrow of self-awareness and wispy scratches ghostly like rotting lace; the concrete poetry of tracking what is right around with sparse doodles that feel like they were born in an instant; circular aphorisms and concentrated marks with blood-like saturation. Double entendres, in-jokes and real love from unreliable narrators you can trust.

Paul and Griffin are my kind of artists. Art-making that is tied up with every moment of living, part of a quest for authenticity, for healing, for freedom of self. Work that uses easy, direct materials to minimize transition from self to surface. In time –talking decades– it takes on a life of its own. The body of all we’ve made vs. the body.

When I read-see Paranoid Tiers I am in a spectral space, parallel to the lives of Urich and McPartland. There was living happening in and around the occasions when pen went to paper. I can feel uninterrupted life encoded on this paper that lived it’s cheap life once before and is now living again. And like Kathy Acker said about writing being a time triad, my present blends with the (already multiple) feelings on the page. The sensations of living –before, during and after stepping through a Paranoid Tier– braid together like stippled shading of a blue ballpoint pen."

— Jason Jägel, San Francisco 10/19/21

Published by & Pens Press in an edition of 300 copies.

• 90 Pages
• 4" x 7"
• Full Color
• Perfect Bound