About

Initiated in 2016 by artists Jason Lazarus (Florida) and Sean Ward (New York), PDF-OBJECTS is a growing collection of embedded text-object sculptures.

Participating artists are asked to submit to organizers:

  1. a single PDF of a text that significantly informs their practice
  2. a description of a commonly available object (valued at $20 USD or less)
  3. instructions on how to sculpturally embed the PDF and object together

PDF-OBJECTS is an invitation into the artist’s thinking and practice–an embodied library, a sculptural field–each object a footnote to the text, or vice versa. The design of the project encourages new moments of scholarship, pedagogy, and intimacy between artist and audience.  Participating artists are able to update their PDF-OBJECTS at any time in order to reflect their current research and practice.

Project inquiries

We are actively building  partnerships with exhibition venues for future iterations of PDF-OBJECTS. Each physical exhibition of PDF-OBJECTS will feature both new artists local to the exhibition venue and international artists already in the collection. For project inquiries email

About the organizers

Jason Lazarus is a Florida based artist, curator, educator, and occasional writer.  His work seeks experiential methods to grapple with the production of knowledge, the politics of representation, and the mobility of the monumental. Lazarus’ practice has been examined by Christopher Knight (LA Times), Michelle Grabner (monograph published by University Galleries of Illinois State University), Lori Waxman (Artforum), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (monograph published by SF Camerawork), Carmen Winant (Frieze), and Ariana Reines (poet, NYC).

Recent solo exhibitions include Chicago Works: Jason Lazarus at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Live Archive at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and The Rickshaw at Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago).  Major exhibitions include About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Love to Love You at MASS MoCA, On the Scene at the Art Institute of Chicago, Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society, and Objecthood in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum.

His project Phase 1 Live Archive is featured on the cover of the recently released publication A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique by Anita Chari (Columbia University Press, 2015). In the summer of 2016, he will be a Resident Artist at the Hunter East Harlem Gallery in NYC. More information at www.jasonlazarus.com

Sean Ward is a New York based artist. He works as an educator of teaching artists and youth through empirical methodologies within the New York public school system. As curator and writer he questions how concept and form find each other; fitting together in a quotidian context resulting in a daily practice in the ephemeral, intuition and often impulsive.

Ward is a Ikebana practitioner of the Ikenobo School. Ikebana is an ancient Japanese art form of flower arrangement. His project Finger Flowers reflects on this practice of silence and close observation. It’s first home and exhibition entitled Container Container was at Fastnet. Ikebana Sensei Yoshie Takahashi with her students (Ward included) and ceramicist Marc Isaacs collaborated on flower arrangements displayed in a shipping container on the docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In 2017, Finger Flowers will manifest in Oak Park, Illinois at Compound Yellow where invited artists from abroad are asked to create containers for local artists to use at an Ikebana workshop led by Ward to create flower arrangements. Finger Flowers is a project rooted in a search for peace, inner or other, by engaging in play with nature.