Marianne Vitale: Train Wreck : Kiito-San : 9780984721061 : 0984721061 : 26 Jan 2016 : Marianne Vitale: Train Wreck is the artist's wry look at the infancy of the American railroad, an age mythologized even in its own time as a period of industrial progress and the heroic conquest of the American frontier. But this progress was fitfully achieved, punctuated by incredible, shocking disasters. In a new artist's book, New York-based artist Marianne Vitale (born 1973) reproduces black-and-white archival photographs of train wreckage on soft, plastic pages, creating an incongruous merger of content and container in a sculptural, compulsively tactile object. Each of the waterproof, pliable plastic pages of this book features a different locomotive carcass or caboose skeleton for readers to re-contort at their leisure. The contrast between the indestructibility of this playtime "bath" book and its imagery depicting the tragic frailty of industrial America's iron workhorses is at once striking