{"title":"Rafael Melendez","description":"\u003cp\u003eRafael Melendez works across publication, performance, and institutional critique. His practice uses authorship, repetition, and image circulation as unstable materials.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOperating at the edge of postmodern appropriation and conceptual publishing, Melendez produces under several registers, including the pseudonymous imprint \u003cstrong\u003eThe Academy of Realness\u003c\/strong\u003e. Its pamphlets, folded publications, and printed documents function as theory-objects, exhibition ephemera, and autonomous works.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe works gathered here were published by Rafael Melendez through art fairs, exhibitions, and related contexts. Each operates as printed matter, artwork, and record. Authorship, function, and status remain open.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"rafael-melendez-after-sturtevant","title":"Rafael Melendez — After Sturtevant","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtist publication \/ pamphlet\u003cbr\u003eThe Academy of Realness, 2022\u003cbr\u003eReleased for SWAB Art Fair, Barcelona, October 2022\u003cbr\u003e16 pages\u003cbr\u003eOffset print on folded paper stock\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: very good; light handling wear consistent with production and storage\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA 16-page artist pamphlet produced by Rafael Melendez under the pseudonym The Academy of Realness. Released for SWAB Barcelona in 2022, \u003cem\u003eAfter Sturtevant\u003c\/em\u003e gathers images, quotations and short texts around linguistics, idealism, repetition, difference and ownership in a postmodern context.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication moves through Elaine Sturtevant, Jean Baudrillard, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Blinky Palermo, Warhol and Cady Noland, treating repetition not as copying but as a method of displacement. Its design uses blue monospaced typography, white space, documentation images, exhibition-poster reconstructions and art-historical fragments.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe pamphlet operates as a portable theory-object: a folded support where authorship remains temporarily unstable and where the artwork survives as image, citation and repeated passage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginal period item.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53514375561554,"sku":"RM-AS-2022","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/After_Sturtevant_Pamphlet_2023.jpg?v=1779314949"},{"product_id":"catherine-holly-after-the-pressure-the-cock","title":"Catherine Holly \/ The Academy of Realness — After the Pressure the Cock","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtist publication \/ photocopied zine\u003cbr\u003eThe Academy of Realness, New York, 2014\u003cbr\u003e15.5 × 12.5 cm\u003cbr\u003eStaple-bound paperback\u003cbr\u003e[38] pages\u003cbr\u003eBlack-and-white photocopy process\u003cbr\u003eEdition of 150\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: very good; light handling wear and minor softening to edges consistent with age.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished under The Academy of Realness, a pseudonymous structure later folded into the wider trajectory of The New Rare Editions. Produced during an earlier phase of dispersed identities and shifting authorial positions, \u003cem\u003eAfter the Pressure the Cock\u003c\/em\u003e operates between artist publication, image archive, and provisional narrative sequence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication assembles appropriated images, handwritten interventions, film references, and fragmented visual material into a low-resolution photocopied structure resistant to stable reading. Marilyn Monroe appears alongside scratched gestures, interrupted captions, and displaced text fragments. Piero Gherardi’s costume design for \u003cem\u003eGiulietta degli Spiriti\u003c\/em\u003e enters less as citation than as material passing through another image economy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title itself functions almost like a cut-up proposition: pressure, sexuality, absurdity, and image culture collapsing into a phrase that feels both declarative and unresolved. Produced through staple binding and photocopy processes, the publication retains the logic of an object intended for circulation rather than permanence while surviving as a retained record of an earlier authorial fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginal period item.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53514402234706,"sku":"CH-ATPTC-2014","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/After_The_Pressure_2015.jpg?v=1779317186"},{"product_id":"rafael-melendez-born-to-die","title":"Rafael Melendez — Born to Die","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnique artist’s book \/ assemblage publication\u003cbr\u003e2016\u003cbr\u003eApprox. 32 + 32 pages (64 pages total)\u003cbr\u003eDigitally manipulated screenshots and found images with text interventions\u003cbr\u003eHand-assembled and bound from two separate books joined at the spine\u003cbr\u003eOne-of-one\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: unique handmade object with minor handling marks and material irregularities intrinsic to production.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBorn to Die\u003c\/em\u003e began through the collection of screenshots, saved images, and text fragments gathered and reorganized through a stream-of-consciousness process. Images were resized, cropped, duplicated, and altered through simple consumer software applications, allowing the work to remain close to the logic of accumulation rather than formal composition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication takes \u003cstrong\u003eMarina Abramović and Ulay’s\u003c\/strong\u003e performances \u003cem\u003eRelation in Time\u003c\/em\u003e (1977) and \u003cem\u003eRest Energy\u003c\/em\u003e (1980), together with \u003cstrong\u003eLouise Bourgeois’s\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cem\u003eJanus\u003c\/em\u003e (1968), as underlying structural references rather than subjects for illustration. The paired body, the doubled body, tension, attachment, mirroring, dependence, and psychic division move through the publication in fragmented form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhysically, the work consists of two separate 32-page books later joined into a single object through a \u003cstrong\u003edos-à-dos (back-to-back) binding structure\u003c\/strong\u003e, assembled with a deliberately loose spine connection. Traditionally the format allows two books to occupy one body while retaining separate orientations; here the logic is disrupted. The work behaves less as a conventional artist’s book than as a conjoined structure — two image sequences temporarily sharing a support while remaining partially independent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title \u003cem\u003eBorn to Die\u003c\/em\u003e introduces another circular structure: beginning and ending collapsed into a single phrase. Images circulate through the book in a similar way, appearing as residues rather than stable illustrations. Figures split, repeat, and return. Authorship itself moves between source material, appropriation, editing, and assembly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eUnique work. Original period item.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rafael Melendez","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53515787895122,"sku":"RM-BTD-2016","price":300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Born_to_Die_2016.jpg?v=1779342988"},{"product_id":"catherine-holly-academy-of-realness-fuck-book","title":"Catherine Holly \/ The Academy of Realness — Fuck Book","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtist publication \/ facsimile journal\u003cbr\u003eThe Academy of Realness, New York \/ London, 2014\u003cbr\u003e40 pages including covers\u003cbr\u003eColour cover, black-and-white interiors\u003cbr\u003eOffset \/ photocopy-derived reproduction from altered found notebook material\u003cbr\u003eEdition of 25\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProduced from a discarded off-licence memo book acquired during an early visit to London, \u003cem\u003eFuck Book\u003c\/em\u003e operates somewhere between artist journal, punk zine, diary-object and conceptual facsimile. The original support — an ordinary British stationer’s memo pad — becomes a site of accumulation and interference. Price stickers, retail residue, medication labels, rubber-stamped cartoon imagery, and stencil typography are layered into a loose sequence of statements, repetitions and interruptions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIssued under the overlapping identities of Catherine Holly and The Academy of Realness — with Rafael Melendez functioning simultaneously as author, editor, producer and displaced signatory — the publication treats authorship as unstable. The object shifts between pseudonym and attribution rather than settling into either one.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication draws from self-published artist books, Xerox-era zine culture, mail-art logic and diaristic forms of conceptual publishing. Rather than presenting a coherent narrative, it accumulates fragments: slogans, administrative traces, found graphics and repeated gestures that move between private notebook and public statement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe original notebook remains visible beneath the reproduction process. Retail labels survive. Found supports remain legible. A cheap object is temporarily repositioned as journal, artwork and printed artifact.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOriginal period item.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53516010717522,"sku":"CH-FB-2014","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Fuck_Book_2014_001.jpg?v=1779344986"},{"product_id":"catherine-holly-my-brother-ist-not-daniel-richter-my-father-ist-not-gehrhart","title":"Catherine Holly \/ The Academy of Realness — My Brother Is Not Daniel Richter \/ My Father Is Not Gehrhart","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtist publication \/ first edition\u003cbr\u003eThe Academy of Realness, New York, 2014\u003cbr\u003eApprox. 36–40 pages including covers\u003cbr\u003eColour cover, black-and-white interiors\u003cbr\u003eStaple-bound \/ photocopy and digital collage process\u003cbr\u003eEdition of 15\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProduced under the overlapping identities of Catherine Holly and The Academy of Realness, \u003cem\u003eMy Brother Is Not Daniel Richter \/ My Father Is Not Gehrhart\u003c\/em\u003e functions as a displaced family album assembled through the language of contemporary art, found imagery, and unstable authorship. The title itself begins as a denial — a statement of distance from inherited positions and cultural associations — while simultaneously establishing new fictive relations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePages move through a stream of appropriated fragments: exhibition references, photographs of artists, photocopied reproductions, clipped texts, accidental pairings, retail residue, and detached captions. Figures appear without hierarchy. Daniel Richter, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jean Cocteau and anonymous source material coexist as equal image-events within a loose field of association.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than operating as documentary evidence, the publication assembles a temporary structure of affiliations and misreadings. Names become stand-ins; images become relatives; cultural memory becomes reorganized through juxtaposition. The recurring use of stickers, Strand Bookstore price labels, transfers and photocopied residue leaves traces of acquisition and circulation visible rather than concealed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication sits somewhere between artist book, image archive, zine, and conceptual scrapbook. Less concerned with narrative than with adjacency, it treats collecting itself as a compositional method — an early attempt to test how images, names and identities drift away from their original positions and acquire new relationships through editing and repetition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIssued before later iterations of The New Rare, the work already contains many of the structural concerns that would continue through subsequent publications: pseudonymous production, unstable authorship, found material, and the movement of printed matter from private record toward autonomous object.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOriginal period item.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53516198019410,"sku":"CH-MBNDR-2014","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/My_Brother_ist_not_Daniel_Richter_My_Father_ist_Not_Gehrhart_000.jpg?v=1779346491"},{"product_id":"rafael-melendez-nothings-wrong-2008","title":"Rafael Melendez — Nothing’s Wrong","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnique artist book \/ collage journal\u003cbr\u003e2008\u003cbr\u003eMixed media: altered \u003cem\u003eNew York Times Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e (22 June 2008), notebook pages, envelopes, found paper fragments, drawings in ink and marker, tape, adhesive and collage elements\u003cbr\u003eOne-of-one\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: unique handmade object with handling marks, material irregularities, and surface wear intrinsic to production and use.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNothing’s Wrong\u003c\/em\u003e is an early experiment in appropriation as studio method, produced through the interruption of an existing media object rather than the production of a blank one. A copy of \u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e (22 June 2008) becomes support, armature, and accidental collaborator. Pages are overlaid with hand-drawn figures, phrases, loose narratives, found scraps, notebook pages, and discarded envelopes attached in deliberately non-archival ways — taped, folded, glued, and left vulnerable to movement and deterioration. The object accumulates rather than resolves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe work emerged from an early attempt to understand how images already circulating in the world might be reorganized rather than invented. Mass-media photography and editorial design are treated as material to be redirected. Drawings drift through the pages as interruptions: bodies stretch, split, repeat, mutate, and collide with headlines and fragments of language. Images cease functioning as illustrations and begin operating as relatives, stand-ins, or temporary actors within a larger unstable structure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe project was loosely modeled on Henry Darger’s obsessive narrative universe and specifically on the impossible scale of \u003cem\u003eThe Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal…\u003c\/em\u003e Rather than attempting narrative coherence or epic completion, \u003cem\u003eNothing’s Wrong\u003c\/em\u003e adopts a similar logic of accumulation and continuous expansion. The pages read less like a finished sequence and more like entries from an ongoing private mythology. The object behaves as a small archive of interruptions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLooking back, the publication sits close to artist journals, outsider-book traditions, mail-art sensibilities, and early appropriation-based artist books, but also anticipates later Academy of Realness concerns: pseudonymous structures, found material, unstable authorship, and image circulation as a system of composition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title itself operates almost as a contradiction. Across the pages bodies bend, language fractures, and meanings slide away from one another, while \u003cem\u003eNothing’s Wrong\u003c\/em\u003e insists on its own refusal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOriginal unique artist book. Studio object \/ retained working document.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rafael Melendez","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53516791316818,"sku":"RM-NW-2008","price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Nothing_s_Wrong_2008_001.jpg?v=1779348178"},{"product_id":"rafael-melendez-the-naked-lunch-2023","title":"Rafael Melendez — The Naked Lunch","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtist book\u003cbr\u003eThe Academy of Realness, 2023\u003cbr\u003e148 × 210 mm (portrait)\u003cbr\u003ePerfect bound\u003cbr\u003e196 pages\u003cbr\u003eFull-colour printing\u003cbr\u003eEdition of 45\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Naked Lunch\u003c\/em\u003e is a publication constructed through acts of borrowing, recombination, and image drift. Taking its title and conceptual point of departure from William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel, the book does not attempt to illustrate the original text but instead treats it as a procedural device — a machine through which images, fragments, and cultural debris are reorganized. Burroughs’ methods of discontinuity and the cut-up become displaced into a contemporary image condition shaped by algorithmic production and network circulation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProduced through computer-augmented and AI-generated imagery, the publication assembles a shifting field where advertisements, robots, celebrity images, anatomical fragments, cartoon forms, consumer products, architecture, found photographs, and digital artifacts enter unstable relationships with one another. Figures appear and disappear; identities dissolve into interfaces; bodies become synthetic surfaces. Narrative is interrupted before it stabilizes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf Burroughs’ \u003cem\u003eInterzone\u003c\/em\u003e operated as a hallucinatory geography of addiction, bureaucracy, paranoia, and control, this publication proposes another kind of territory: one formed through endless image circulation and machine interpretation. The grotesque body-horror of the original novel becomes informational rather than biological. Control no longer appears through doctors and institutions alone, but through systems of recommendation, automated image production, media repetition, and synthetic desire.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe publication emerged from concerns that later became central to both \u003cem\u003eThe Academy of Realness\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe New Rare\u003c\/em\u003e: the instability of authorship, the movement of images across contexts, and the possibility that meaning increasingly arrives through editing and arrangement rather than invention. Images are not treated as fixed illustrations but as temporary occupants moving through a larger structure. Names become stand-ins; images become relatives; cultural memory becomes reorganized through juxtaposition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than functioning as an adaptation of Burroughs, \u003cem\u003eThe Naked Lunch\u003c\/em\u003e operates as a secondary object — somewhere between artist publication, visual archive, speculative fiction, and image inventory. A literary work passes through another system and returns altered.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOriginal period publication. Edition released through The Academy of Realness, 2023.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Academy of Realness","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53526672998738,"sku":"RM-TNL-2023","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/The_Naked_Lunch_2023_001.jpg?v=1779418587"},{"product_id":"gay-bronx-council-on-the-arts-longwood-arts-project-2014","title":"GAY — Bronx Council on the Arts \/ Longwood Arts Project, New York, 2014","description":"\u003cp\u003eExhibition announcement card \/ offset print on card stock \/ full colour \/ double-sided\u003cbr\u003eApprox. postcard dimensions\u003cbr\u003eCondition: very good; light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with age and circulation\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn original exhibition card issued for \u003cem\u003eGAY\u003c\/em\u003e, a group exhibition at Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos, Bronx, New York, examining shifts in identity through the cultural production of gay male artists of color across the period 2003–2013. Organised by Ivan Monforte and presented by the Bronx Council on the Arts and Longwood Arts Project, the exhibition brought together an intergenerational and multidisciplinary group of artists including David Antonio Cruz, Steve Locke, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rafael Melendez, and others working across painting, performance, video, photography, and installation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe recto reproduces a lush wooded stream landscape interrupted by the word \u003cem\u003egay\u003c\/em\u003e rendered in thin lowercase white typography — image and text held in quiet tension. The reverse shifts from image to administration: exhibition dates (5 February–7 May 2014), public programming, panel discussions, screenings, community events, and an advisory notice regarding mature content. Infrastructure becomes part of the printed surface.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWithin a The New Rare reading, the object functions as retained institutional material rather than simple promotion. It compresses a larger cultural moment into portable form. The exhibition survives here not as installation but as a circulation object: image on one side, infrastructure on the other.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginal period item. Shipping and handling included in listed price.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The New Rare","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53568994115922,"sku":"GAY-LONGWOOD-INV-2014","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Antoini_Cruz_David._Henry_Imani._Locke_Steven._Show_invite_Gay_._2014_front.jpg?v=1779740245"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/rafael-melendez.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}