The Complex Number Zero Book

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Made over a span of nine years, across the islands of Oahu, Hawaiʻi, and Okinawa, The Complex Number Zero documents a search for a familial origin.

Weaving in and out of observed and constructed imagery, Cleary’s first monograph serves as a map in progress. Perpetually incomplete, this map draws a path through the sites, characters, rituals, superstitions, and objects that together define his family.

“The sites of Cleary’s search (for home, for meaning, and for anchors) seem to have a kind of vanishing point, a self-protectionism, a defensiveness, a spiritual seal… [His] pictures form map-like constellations, bridging the superstitious and the intimate, surveying both a homecoming and a departure… [They] allude gently and profoundly to missing puzzle pieces and their unavailability—even to those searching most intensely for them.” — Zoe Koke

Part magic realism, part autoethnography, part love song, this work wrestles with the idea of an origin, its physicality, spirituality, and its history.

9 x 11 inches, 192 pages

Designed by Becca Lofchie Studio, with assistance from Lauryn Alejo

Texts by Zoe Koke and Max Cleary

Copyediting by Jennelyn Bailon

August 2023

ISBN: 979-8-218-21298-8

Edition of 400, first edition, first printing