The book is case-bound in red cloth, and the cover is stamped in matte black and metallic gold foil. The letterforms were created by Farsi for her work The Names and are based on geometric Kufic script suited to architectural tiling.

Photographer Mario Gallucci’s panoramic image fans out the Linfield Gallery, showing the entire exhibition in one view.

The book’s principal colors are red and gold: red from the tulips of Farsi’s Units of Moveable Earth and gold from The Names, though both colors show up regularly in her other work as well.

The first half of The Points of Departure concerns the work shown at Linfield Gallery, examined in two essays, one by cultural theorist Anne-Marie Oliver and one by the Los Angeles–based curator Trinie Dalton. The second half provides a broader look at Farsi’s work from 2009 to the present, anchored by Stephanie Snyder’s essay on Farsi’s environmental work Territory.

Farsi’s work Units of Moveable Earth consists of one thousand species tulips—an Iranian symbol of martyrdom and an emblem of the country itself since the 1979 revolution—planted in vinyl sacks and timed to bloom at the spring equinox and Persian New Year.

We rationalized the letterforms Farsi developed for her work The Names—scaling them so that the rhomboids aligned with the text leading—and with her permission deployed them as the display typeface, pairing them with Questa, a recent Dutch creole of French Modern types. The nineteenth-century Didones upon which Questa is based were derived from geometry, rather than Renaissance writing models; this particular low-country remix does a good job of bringing some warmth—although little sentiment—into its forms.

Views of Farsi’s sculpture #28, Topkapi Scroll (2017), a three-dimensional translation of a fifteenth-century Islamic architectural arabesque. It can be difficult to get a sense of an installation in one image, so we tend to rely on carefully paced sequences to move the reader’s eye around, as if the book were a very slow film.

That sense of movement should be evident throughout the book. Here, the endnotes for Dalton’s essay overlap a large field of metallic gold, signifying the transition into the book’s second half and creating a figure/ground relationship where the section divider appears to be sliding left.

The gold field recurs throughout the second half of the book. It is used to house Farsi’s notes on each work and to mark the transition from one piece to the next.

Opening detail view of Farsi’s 2009 installation ECHOMAKER.

Subsequent sequence views from ECHOMAKER.

The artist’s conversation with curator Kristan Kennedy is concerned mainly with the work shown, the programmed LED panel And others (2015), but is different from other types of information in the book. Accordingly, it is set in three columns, only partially overlapping the gold field.

Wiring detail and sequence view of And others (2015).

Detail view of Point and Line (2016).

Master view of Point and Line, transitioning to Strata of Empire (2016–). The Points of Departure is only eighty-four pages long, so it was not practical—and would have been boring—to contain each work in discrete spreads. Overlapping image with type was fine, so long as the type was readable and did not obscure important parts of the image.

Master and detail views of Strata of Empire (2016–). Throughout the book, works were captioned along the top of the page, captions aligned with the left side of the image referenced.

Treatment of the artist’s abridged CV and a brief statement.