pAraDoOx of In Tolerance

Accordion Style Book: Colored pencil, graphite, acrylic on archival board

Folded: 6"(height) X 13.5" (width) X 4.1" (depth)

Fully Extended: 6" X .25" X 139" 

Arranged: 6" X 17" X 39.75"

Within this artist book, I transposed the intrinsic contradiction of the Paradox of Tolerance through a process of linguistic and graphic morphing, a gradual and incremental displacement of one word by another through sequential letter substitutions, positional shifts, and visual transformations. Moving from left to right and front to back, the letters, colors, and relative positions of the words TOLERANCE and INTOLERANCE progressively exchanged places, structurally enacting the Paradox of Tolerance: the idea that when tolerance is extended to the intolerant, it risks enabling intolerance to dominate, thereby eroding the very principle it depends on. Each word eventually occupied the other’s position, then returned to its origin, only to begin morphing again in an endless loop.

The book also embedded an inverse paradox, my own proposition, that intolerance of intolerance can itself become a form of self-negation, revealing an unresolved tension between resistance and complicity. By mapping linguistic instability onto ideological conflict, the work mirrored how language and belief systems shift, erode, and reconstitute over time.

Its structure was deliberately mutable, lacking a definitive beginning or end. Colors alternated and shifted in sync with the letters, reinforcing the cyclical nature of ideological struggle. When unfolded or rearranged, the book could be read linearly or as a continuous loop, like a Möbius strip or infinity symbol, a recursive cycle of opposing beliefs. The cover, traced from the book’s closed outline, compressed its interior into a mirrored silhouette, turning contradiction into sculptural form.

Ultimately, the book operated within its own paradox, both structurally and philosophically. Through its self-regenerating system of transformation, it resisted closure, reflecting how opposing ideologies perpetually negated and reconstituted one another. Its looping structure and infinite variations suggested the instability of conviction and the paralysis that arose when contradiction became the only constant. Rather than illustrating paradox, the work performed it, becoming a living contradiction that challenged the very possibility of absolute certainty.