Time Capsule

Summary

Time Capsule is a cache of sketchbook drawings, animals, and insects. Letterforms are treated with a casual randomness, punctuating a non-linear narrative. This is a book of beautiful, ambiguous visual poetry and questions.

Maggie Umber's intimate drawings evoke a sense that life on earth, no matter how microscopic, can be immensely beautiful and complex.
— Jason Murphy

Time Capsule is almost wordless, with the few passages that contain words functioning more as poetic framing devices or just lush expressions of a human trying to deal with the confusion of existence. Throughout the book there are letters and numbers rendered as drawings that become decorative design elements on the page, and though they occasionally remind me of where we came from, they also make me think of code, as if in Umber's words, she is seeking an "innate algorithm that breaks down the world hungrily." It's this revolving door of collecting and processing with no ultimate sense to come from the endeavor that I find both mysterious and compelling.
— The Comics Journal
Snapshots of moments that would be filler in a nature documentary but that, when collected and cataloged together, delve into the intimacy of those moments and the complexity of animalistic relationships we can never fully understand.
— Shawn Starr

✍ Debuted at SPX (Small Press Expo), 2015
✍ Time Capsule made Rob Kirby's Rob's Top 30 Comics and Comics-related Things of 2015
✍ 6/12-6/14/16 two let's make zines workshops, zeitraumexit, Mannheim, Germany
✍ 6/16/16 Artist panel Comics as Job moderated by Jakob Hoffmann with Richard McGuire, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
✍ 5/20-6/14/16 … AND OTHER STORIES COMIC EXHIBITION, zeitraumexit, Mannheim, Germany. Curated by Tilo Schwarz

Credits: video and Time Capsule art by Maggie Umber.

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