High Winds is an artist's book written by Sylvan Oswald, with graphics by Jessica Fleischmann. This “western phantasmagoria” is a bedtime book for adults based on Oswald's experiences with insomnia,
gender transition, and moving to Los Angeles.
How does sleep—or its absence—change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann's atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics,
net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald's text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions—inspired by the author's experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful—
High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night's sleep.
Sylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles who creates plays, texts, publications, and video. His work explores the ways we forge our individual and national identities.
