Italy-born, Toronto-based visual artist Flavio Trevisan possesses a well-demonstrated knack for raising unorthodoxy from repetition and regularity, and the perfect-bound TRANSITION: Dissolve is yet another testament to his expertise. After an intermission of 4 years, Trevisan returns to his TRANSITION series with this digitally-printed, black-and-white installment. And it is worth the wait: Dissolve is arguably the most sophisticated, mindful chapter in the series. Similar to TRANSITION: Zoom In, the book opens into a double-spread title page. One soon realizes that the volume lends itself to a flip book approach, and as one proceeds, the text fades into ethereal imprints and ultimately vanishes while an underlying photo of a pair of hands holding open a blank book saturates into view.
Aided by the photo’s mimicry of the reader’s own hands, the reading experience becomes very self-aware (“meta,” if you will) as one tries to reconcile the impetus to swiftly flip as “appropriate” with the urge to slowly thumb so as to actually take in the informative text before it evanesces into illegibility. In this understated modulation, the manual animation executes an unusual visual change of transparency rather than figural movement. In doing so, it prompts interrelated thinking on authorship, memory, information, conscious reading, and mark-making.