New York-based artist Kelley Walker hacks advertising and displays its inner workings as art. His large-scale prints appropriate iconic cultural images, digitally altering them to expose their underlying agendas. In "Black Star Press: Black Star, Star Press Star" (2004), Walker combined nondigital collage processes to reference abstract painting: He smeared newspaper photos of the Birmingham race riots with melted chocolate and toothpaste, scanned them into a computer and made photographic prints from the results. Such hybridized work is neither quite post-Pop nor just appropriation. In the past few years, Walker has emerged as one of the most innovative and rigorous young artists in New York and has become much in demand not only for his solo work but for his collaborations with fellow New Yorker Wade Guyton. This monograph is a valuable introduction to Walker's technical processes, and essays by maverick critic and curator Bob Nickas and writer Scott Rothkopf lend much insight into his practice.

In 1995, Mike Kelley devised the Educational Complex, an amalgam of every school he attended and of the house he grew up in, "with all the parts I couldn't remember left out"--a total environment, "sort of like the model of a Modernist community college." The blind spots in this model represent forgotten ("repressed") zones, and so are reconceived by Kelley as sites of institutional abuse, for which specific traumas were devised (each having their own video and sculptural component). For Kelley, this work marks the beginning of a series of projects in which pseudo-autobiography, repressed-memory syndrome and the reinterpretation of previous pieces become the tools for a poetic deconstruction of such complexes and the way we interact with and narrate them. "Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008" is the first book to collect these works. Each project within the series is extensively documented by artist's texts and reference material, while essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Howard Singerman and Anne Pontegnie examine the place of this body of work within Kelley's oeuvre.