I Write Artist Statements by Liz Sales (Daylight Books, July 2018) is a paperback consisting of humorously inventive, fictionalized artist statements about imagined photo-based art projects. Each lovingly pokes fun at the whole notion of “art speak,” skewering popular art school clichés and describing impossible projects that simply could not exist off of the printed page. Sales employs the template of artist-written statements, biographies and press releases to address the recent explosion of interest in academic photo-based art programs around the world, which has led to a dramatic increase in overwritten, hyperbolic artist statements.

Among these statements she conjures a rivalry between two invented entities (the Seattle Camera Club for High Modern Real Estate Photography and the Portland Collective for Post-Modern Real Estate Photography); an artist who creates three-dimensional photo-based compositions that incorporate aspects of sculpture, collage and the concepts from Marie Kondo’s self-help book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (see below); and the chronicles of Mars rover pair Spirit (January 4, 2004-March 22, 2010) and Opportunity (b. January 25, 2004), two robots that landed on opposite sides of Mars in 2004 in order to continue the work of master photographer Ansel Adams.