Companion to a larger artwork, Encyclopedia, Index is constructed from the index to the thirty volume Encyclopedia Americana that the artist grew up with. McCarney’s organization of the encyclopedia’s information began with carving a grid of one inch squares into the Index (volume 30) with a hammer and chisel. Thus altered, the pages were scanned into a computer and became background information for the next stage of the project, the translation of an image of the artist’s hand into a mock digital scan. Using an actual scanned image of his hand as a guide, the artist reproduced its pattern of white and black pixels by substituting the chopped up columns of the index for white pixels and images previously culled from the 29 volumes of the encyclopedia for black pixels. The result, laid out in the pages of this book, is not identifiable as a handprint, but it certainly functions similarly: a highly structured collection of visual information that serves to identify a person. Even without knowing the elaborate system behind the construction of McCarney’s Encyclopedia and Index, the visual puzzle is tantalizingly full of clues, and the reader is invited to make what he or she can of the artist making sense of his world.