 Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch
Return to the entire exhibition Domestic Science As in Queen Souvenirs of Great Cities It Will All Make Sense to You Later
Pretty Rocks
House Hunting Scroll Parts
PSHAW! Agnès in Winter The Blue Coat Beans Rosetta Stone Prototype Odd Utterances Ur-Text Volume III
Bomb-Proof Book (ZRC1(ZI2ZFPR)) | | X Libris: Our 10th Anniversary Exhibition
Contemporary Bay Area Artists' Books So what is an artist's book? Definitions of the term are as varied as the objects themselves. In simple terms, artists' books are books created by artists where the artist has total control over every aspect of the creative process. Artists' books can take any format: from a traditional codex to a tunnel book and beyond, the variations are endless. The history of contemporary artists' books can be traced to the 1960's when artists began making multiple copies of cheaply produced work in order to disseminate and democratize their art. Artists' books offer a non-traditional relationship between book and reader. The Bay Area is particularly rich in book artists. These artists and their creations have been great influences, a strong guiding light for the Center over the years.
Nance O'Banion Julie Chen, Flying Fish Press Box by Sandy Tilcock Letterpress Book with box 1990 Edition of 150 The 58 beautiful linoleum-cut images of Domestic Science instantly draw in any reader. The inventive structure by Julie Chen speaks for itself, with its intricately engineered pop-ups and the pull-out panels containing witty, playful, yet powerful text and images that examine our contemporary life. The book surprises and delights with its reflections on the intricacies of domestic science. Idioms are defined through icons in the book. In the first section, House, the icon "house, powerhouse" signifies an energetic team or person; "house moss" refers to dust balls; "home, home free" stands for being out of trouble; "homeboy" refers to a person from one's hometown; and under the heading of Floor Coverings, the "rug rat" icon refers to infant and the "rug" icon stands for hairpiece. As in Queen (The ABCedarium of a Typophiliac) An alphabet book based on the letter Q, the text of As in Queen is a series of praise poems to this singular letter. The words form "mesostics" (similar to acrostics) in which a word is created by the vertical alignment of horizontal lines in the middle of the text block. The words thus formed are the name of the typeface of the particular Q, presented in alphabetical order. Leda Black, the writer and designer as well as printer, binder, and publisher of this book, says she "sought to make the writing and the physicality of the work wholly entwined. The cropped emphasis on parts of letters dovetails with the fetishism of the words to embody the obsessive gaze of the typophiliac."
Souvenirs of Great Cities: New York, Paris, London and San Francisco This delightful set of four favorite cities distilled into their "greatest hits" is a joy to behold. Sights are celebrated in rhyme and pop-up illustrations. Each book is a 20-page concertina with two removable spines so that both sides of the concertina carry text and pop-up images. The books were printed 1992 and 1995. The San Francisco book even shows the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. In NY you travel from Chinatown to the subway to B Altman's, Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library. You admire the city skyline, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, with a hats off to Yule's own love of skating, the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park.
Jody Alexander is an artist, bookbinder, papermaker, librarian, and teacher who lives and works in Santa Cruz. She uses handmade papers in exposed sewing structures, and combines the books with found objects to create sculptural works. She often coats her pieces with either beeswax or an encaustic medium, which lends the work a hind of age as well as a translucency and luminosity that pulls the viewer in. It Will All Make Sense to You Later tells stories using object-like books, boxes and bottles instead of words. The direction of the story is suggested by the objects and the title; it leaves things purposely vague, so the viewer can fill in the story.
Pretty Rocks This book is the miniature reproduction of a manuscript book by Suzanne Thomas (age 6). Using phonetic spellings, Suzanne tells a story of an angel taking a walk to find pretty rocks. Since 1976, Suzanne's parents, Peter and Donna Thomas, have worked collaboratively and individually, making paper, printing, and binding books. In the 1980's their vision of the book they wanted to create expanded beyond simply fine press. They began to work in new formats, exploring nontraditional book structures and shaped book objects, as both limited editions and one-of-a-kind books.
House Hunting Scroll Judith Serebrin has been keeping illuminated journals and making limited edition and unique books from etchings, monotypes, and drawings since 1989. In 1994 she was the recipient of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts' D. Steven Corey Award for House Hunting Scroll. This charming book reflects the anxieties of searching for a new home demonstrated in a whirlwind of houses. Cleverly, the scroll is contained in its own wooden home. Parts This piece is a quiet acknowledgment of the presence of the natural world and the way it intersects our human lives in amazing yet mundane ways. Victoria May is fascinated with the way humans fit into this presence: we are physically linked to it, yet have mentally abstracted the physical world around us, analyzing and cataloging it, to a point of separation. May works with juxtaposition - the dictionary pages with natural artifacts refer to the notion that all words and ideas are rooted in the physical. This book represents an encyclopedia of personal language materials. The parts were gathered from the lawn, travels, a parking lot, a dinner party, and a Chinese market; they include a flower, eggshells, chicken ribs, anchovies and sand. Materials and their metaphorical value are the main impetus for her work. Using the book format, she is seduced by this categorizing obsession. Yet she tries to draw connections among various biological rhythms, including human existence, in an effort to reconcile the dichotomy between the natural and the intellectual.
PSHAW! (30 Years of Poltroonery) Last year marked Poltroon's 30th anniversary. In some respects this book is an anthology of recreated favorite items from the press's history, but in addition there are some new works created just for this book. It also contains checklists of literary broadsides, posters, and other ephemeral items that Poltroon has printed over the last three decades. The headings are calligraphed by Frances Butler and colored by pochoir. The samples were recreated by a variety of means: letterpress, inkjet prints, and even Xerox and crayon (for the Acute Actualism poster). There are 28 ephemeral items glued into each copy of the book, and two essays - one each by Butler and Johnston. Poltroon Press was founded April 1, 1975, by Butler and Johnston in Berkeley. They collaborated on several explorations of text and image, which proved influential in the artist's book movement in years to come. Gastronomy During Wartime: a Banquet Menu The banquet menu used for this book was published by Charles Monselet in L'Almanach Gourmand, his captivating and instructive chronicle of gastronomy. It was put together by the Marechal de Richelieu during the Hanoverian War. Though the country surrounding his chateau was devastated for miles, the Marechal wanted nonetheless to provide dinner for thirty or so important prisoners. His officers, charged with putting together the meal, complained that there was nothing to make a meal out of except a carcass of beef and some roots. The Marechal commented that that was more than enough to prepare a most exquisite dinner and that the meal should be followed with all that could be found by way of jams and preserves. The menu is printed with one course per side on the hexagonal carousel book which is encased in a hexagonal box. A niche under the covered dish houses the booklet describing the history of the menu and a facsimile of the menu itself. Morton produced this book at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
Agnès in Winter Shumacher says: "Agnès in Winter was inspired by a woman I met in Paris. When visiting Paris for the first time I looked up a friend of a friend. She fed me and we got rather drunk; she explained her beliefs in a Buddhist form of Christianity and offered what she called a 'Christian' massage. I accepted, but when she asked me to remove my shoes, I was embarrassed. I'd been so excited by Paris that I'd walked continuously, fifteen hours a day for a week; my feet were bleeding. She removed my shoes, saw the blood coating my socks, and exclaimed: 'Christ!' Then, I left her house in Montparnasse and walked back to my hotel, and snow began to fall and it seemed to fall forever."
The Blue Coat Tireless innovators, exemplary teachers, enthusiastic supporters of other artists, Anna and Arne Wolf have been mainstays of the Bay Area book and letter arts communities for 35 years. Through Arne's wood type typography, and Anna's paper engineering, Blue Coat represents a rare artistic collaboration for the couple. This book honors Gertrude Stein.
Beans This book about life cycles is a lush visual experience in which the text, describing the artist's out-of-control garden, is surrounded and almost overwhelmed by entwining string bean vines and vibrantly-colored flowers. Each spread in Beans opens onto a densely layered scene with rich color from the linoleum block prints which bleed off all four edges and run over from one page to the next. This book can be read one page at a time in the conventional manner, or, when the removable spine is set aside, it can be opened to create a three-dimensional paper structure which can be displayed as a sculpture and viewed in the round.
Rosetta Stone Prototype This is not an artist's book per se, but it points to the kind of technology future book artists might use. The Rosetta Project is an online archive of all documented human languages. It is a worldwide effort to produce an updated version of the famous Rosetta Stone, which dates from 196 BC. Napoleon's troops discovered the Rosetta Stone in el-Rashid, Egypt, in 1799. They found inscribed upon the granite slab three parallel translations of a certain decree in Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek. Using the Greek text, experts of the 1800s were able to decipher the previously elusive hieroglyphic script. For this project entries from 1,000 languages were micro-etched onto 27,000 data pages. These disks contain the first three chapters of Genesis in each language, vernacular texts, pronunciation keys, lists of common words, and spoken samples (audio files) with transcriptions. With a life expectancy of 2,000 years, this attempt to keep data for future generations gives new meaning to the word archival.
Odd Utterances Mary Austin says, "I first started printing at age fourteen, and by the time I was in my late twenties I felt the need to use text - I wanted something more than what I was able to convey through images. Finding the book arts community in the Bay Area allowed me finally to be heard. While taking a letterpress printing class at New College in 1989, I printed my first book, Odd Utterances. This book represents the beginning of a relationship for me. I was dating my future husband. A friend of his, Carl Feynman, had a huge collection of odd utterances that he attached to his computer signatures. After making a selection of utterances, we started designing and laying out the type by hand. It was a wonderful project. There is that feeling of magic when with the first sheet of the press ink meets paper, and then you suddenly realize 'Oh no! It is backwards.' But then a little voice in my head goes off and says, 'You meant to do that, didn't you?' and somehow the error becomes interesting. What might have been a mistake is suddenly transformed into a creative solution. For me printing is about being flexible."
Ur-Text Volume III A hyper-modernist edition of his concrete poem, wordswords is, this book ironically symbolizes the devaluation and loss of faith in the word. Ur-Text is an extreme example of a metaphor and an icon of the book as object. The book was hand-bound by Daniel Kelm, and features acid-etched zinc-lined covers. Primary sewing is braided Dacron thread holding each signature to an external brass spine rod covered by aluminum tube segments, leaving space for a weaving of braided silk thread which connects the covers and signatures.
Bomb-Proof Book (ZRC1(ZI2ZFPR)) Rich Spelker says, "History has been a disaster for the book. It is said that 99% of classical Greek and Roman works have been lost through war, natural catastrophe and, mostly, apathy. Western civilization is based on the assumption that we are created in the image of God. The book is the model of self, therefore if God is dead (a once-popular idea) then we and our books are also dead. Libraries become mausoleums of dead reflections. Science & technology have today become our source for artificial epiphanies. In building bomb-proof books I have engaged in a futile effort to ensure the survivability of self. The human condition has offered us threats from the outside and an aggressive nature to react to them, reinforcing the inevitability of mortality. The book has now become weapon and target." |
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It Will All Make Sense to You Later