New print-on-demand title finished this past week: "report from the other side".

This past week I finished another title in my border issues book series. This one is about border walls. The title of the book is report from the other side. It uses the walls and fences of the small Texas town of Westway to explore the psychology and cultural significance of the great border fence that has been under construction just south of where I live in Tucson. Although all of the interior images are from Westway, the cover photograph is of the 21 foot high border fence/wall in Nogales.

The book is available directly from MagCloud at a cost of $24.95 in an open-edition soft-cover trade version. The link to the website is here.

These are three page spreads from the 120 page book. The entire book is visible on the MagCloud site and a digital version is available for $6.00.

Review of show at Purchase College in the NYT.

In yesterday's Sunday New York Times' Metro section there was a very nice review of curator Tennae Maki's show "P is for Performance" which is at the Purchase College Library gallery. Ms. Maki is a Neuberger Museum curatorial fellow and a student in Purchase’s master’s program in modern and contemporary art, criticism and theory. The show is up until April if you are in the New York area.

The link is here. The main, first image of the article is one from my book High Tension. There is also mention at the end of the article of my book Sanctus Sonorensis.

Although the review was posted on the NYT website on Saturday, February 23rd, it appeared in the Sunday edition and took up a large part of the front page of that section. Alas, we don't get that section out here in Arizona, so I haven't seen the hard copy version.

Visiting Artist Lecture at MICA

Last week I went to Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore to give a visiting artist lecture and help do crits in Laurie Snyder's Photobook class. The visit was hosted by the Photography Department along with the Book Art Concentration which is in Printmaking. Interestingly, there are three different book classes taught at MICA, one in Photo, one in Printmaking and one in General Fine Arts which is called GFA.

Laurie, who is retiring at the end of this year after teaching at MICA for 20 years, and she and Gail Deery, one of the primary professors in Printmaking and for many years the Chair, took me on an extensive tour of most of the MICA campus. The size was impressive and completely changed since the last time that I visited in 1980 or 1981. It has gone from about 600 students to over 2200 and now own a great deal of the buildings in that part of downtown, including the beautiful old 19th century train station which is now the Sculpture Department. The photo area is in the original beautiful white marble 1828 building. MICA started in 1821 an is the oldest arts school in the United States.

After giving my lecture the next morning, I saw more of the MICA buildings, had a great lunch in the student cafeterias and was really impressed with the facilities and students. This impression was confirmed by the students I met and the work from Laurie's book class which I sat in on in the afternoon.

During my lecture about my work, I mentioned that I was working on a couple of new books about predator drones along the SW border. Nate Larson, who teaches photography there is also doing a lot of work with drones and showed me some great video that he had shot with his Parrot drone copter.

Many thanks to Laurie Snyder for having me come, and to all the others there who made my stay there very pleasant including Gail Deery, Regina DeLouise (Purchase College grad), Nate Larson, and Jay Gould. I will also have very fond memories of a fantastic dinner at a place called Birroteca.

Paradise Lost: An Allegory at Seager Gray Gallery

The title and subject of this book is inspired by John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. It is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost is interesting to me because it makes real human characters (with strong personalities) of Adam and Eve as well as God and Satan. All are very human, with strengths and foibles. As an atheist, the story as a whole seems laughable to me. But it also seems to serve as a strong metaphor for the human condition including the weaknesses and greed that we as humans have in some degree. Although to some it might seem a peculiar stretch, it is not hard to my mind to make the connections that explain our blindness to the causes changing the climate of our irreplaceable planetary home, Earth.

 

 The editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature write, “Milton’s Paradise Lost is ultimately about the human condition, the Fall that caused ‘all our woe,’ and the promise and means of restoration. It is also about knowing and choosing, about free will.” The original is in a form of antiquated English which I changed to a more contemporary English, using both the original and various “plain English” translations as well as my own rewriting of a number of lines.

My book was created under the guidelines for a show proposed by Barb Tetenbaum and Julie Chen using an aleatoric system of Barb Tetenbaum’s devising. They (Chen and Tetenbaum) asked a number of artists to each create a book for a show in February 2013 at the Seager-Gray Gallery in Mill Valley CA called Ideation by Chance. The premise for the show proposed that each artist would have a series of cards drawn for them from a deck that Tetenbaum had devised. The cards showed categories of content and structure in bookart, and each artist had to create their book for the show using the results of the cards drawn for them.

I use the result of the fall from grace as an allegory for the acquisition of the human characteristics that have contributed to the environmental rape and destruction of Earth. In my book there are three sections, much reduced from Milton’s twelve. In the first section, Adam’s voice is heard in dialog with Eve in the garden. In the second section the Snake convinces Adam and Eve to use their free will and partake of the forbidden fruit. The quest for ‘knowledge’ mentioned in that section can be taken a number of ways. In the final and third section God speaks: there are consequences for the human fall from grace and resulting destruction of the Garden. At the end there is a final cautionary coda which predicts an unhappy ending for mankind but restoration for Eden. While in Hawaii during December 2012, I could not help but notice some of the unhappy results that ever-increasing human populations were making on the ecosystems of Oahu. While there, hurricane Sandy struck the northeastern seaboard creating the largest amount of property damage ever made by a storm on the North American continent. Both of these events were in my thoughts while working on ideas for the book.

I wanted to have the book feel a little like a brightly colored fruit, tempting and chromatically luscious on the outside, with a beige, meaty inside, with slightly ‘off’ colors. The inside is also primarily monochromatic, which was one of my given book guideline restrictions. The front cover has the garden path in; the back cover an unclear path out.

The inside pages of the board accordion book contain the text and are, at least on first look, a warm sepia monochrome color printed on recycled kraft-colored paper. The images are actually made up of larger-than-normal CMYK halftone dots. The whites are added by using white Prismacolor colored pencil, a sort of chiaroscuro, satisfying the assigned requirement of using hand=drawing in the book.

The 'outside' of the book are brightly colored jungle/tropical veiws taken in December in Hawai'i. The hinges between the two sections were stained and printed Tyvek.

My given cards, drawn by Barb Tetenbaum and Julie Chen from a stack of card choices, were:

Imagery: traced, re-drawn, lifted from outside source. [ White chiaroscuro pencil drawing on inner pages.]
Structure: accordion  [ Yes.]
Text: self-generated  [ I rewrote a plain text abridged version of the poetics of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.]
Layout: based on an historic example  [ As all contemporary accordion books are.]
Color: monochromatic  [ The inside is faux monochromatic.]
Describe: serious, sober, scientific. [ Refers to serious sober reality of global warning and our resistance to do anything about it.]
Technical: hand drawn, painted, collaged, etc.  [ Hand-drawn white pencil on inside pages/photographs. ]
Paper:  pre-printed or recycled. [The inner paper is recycled French Paper Co. paper.]
Adjectives: traditional, mysterious, spiritual, mosaic, obvious.  [ All of the above except ‘mosaic’. ]

The tropical plant images used throughout were taken on Ohahu, Hawai’i during the month of December, 2012. The premise for the show at Seagram-Gray was conceived as a combination of celebrating the 100th birthday of John Cage in 2012 and the opening of the biennial CODEX Symposium and Book Fair in February 2013.

Ojalá

During the summer of 2012, Spaceheater Editions published three books not by me, plus another book that I produced with the collaboration of Mexican writer and media artist Leon de la Rosa. Leon did the writing for the book Ojalá and I made the images and did the book design. The main edition is in a bit of a limbo as we hope to produce the trade volume through the University of Arizona Press, but we need to raise funds for subvention and have not been successful thus far in that regard. We have produced a special limited edition until that happens.

The book is about the bloody drug wars that rage inside the Mexican borders, and what it is like to live in Ciudad Juárez, where Leon lives with his wife Gabriela and where both teach at the University in Juárez. The text is in Spanglish. I made the most of the photographs and added a few police photographs that were in the public domain. The word ojalá derived from the arabic inshallah, meaning "I wish it were so" and describes the wishful thinking that Mexico can someday return to the days before the brutality and violence of the narco-cartels.

Below are some images of the cover and some of the two-page spreads of Ojalá.

 Title page shows the border fence along the Rio Grande in El Paso, which looks across to some of the Colonias.

 

The view of Cuidad Juárez from the hills of El Paso.

 I have added large halftone dots to the photos to give the images the gritty feel that they have been torn out of the pages of newspapers.

 This shows the last page that contains text.

The last shot before the colophon is one of blackbirds in bare trees.

Leon de la Rosa and his wife are living in Tucson right now while he is working on a PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education. Gabriela is working on a postdoc also at the University of Arizona.

Recent shows | Late Winter, Early Spring 2013

A few new shows and events that I am involved with right now:

I'm in a show at Texas Women's University Gallery of Art is a show Seductive Alchemy: Books by Artists Curated by: Ruth R. Rogers / Curator of Special Collections at the Margaret Clapp Library / Wellesley College. The show is from January 21 to February 15, with a Lecture and Reception: January 22, 4-6pm    

The new book I just finished called Paradise Lost: An Allegory will be in a show at Seager Gray Gallery, in Mill Valley, CA. It opens on Saturday, February 9th. The show is called Ideation by Chance and is a celebration of both the 100th anniversary of the birthday of John Cage (last year) and the opening of CODEX, the largest Art of the Book Fair in the world. The show was curated by Barb Tetenbaum and Julie Chen.    

There is a reception for The Physical Photograph on Saturday night at Art Intersection in Gilbert AZ, a suburb of Phoenix. The reception is from 6 to 8 pm on January 19th. The Physical Photograph, in the North and South Galleries, explores the inherent physicality of object based photographic art. Included in the exhibition are mixed media/sculptural objects and book arts. I have two books in this show.

I'm in a show at the gallery space of the Purchase College Library, State University of NY in Purchase NY, called P is for Performance: Artists' Books on Shelves and in Public Spaces which takes place from February 6th to April 24th. This show was curated by Tennae Maki.

A little later in the Spring I will have two pieces in a show in Las Cruces, NM at Unsettled Gallery in a show called Crossroads: Book Arts on the Border. The show will run April 13th to May 4th.

And lastly, two lectures/visiting artist gigs: during the week of February 18th I will be doing a visiting artist visit at MICA in Baltimore, then in March giving a lecture/paper on teaching photo artists' book-making in the university. This will be at the 50th anniversary national conference of SPE (the Society for Photographic Education) in Chicago, IL.

New Spaceheater Titles | Summer 2012

Here are the titles that we published during the summer of 2012 and were first introduced to the public during the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF) at MoMA-PS1 in Long Island City, NY during the last few days of September, 2012.

1. The Redacted Mother Goose by Rob Wilson. This is a special redacted version of the venerable anthology of Mother Goose rhymes with illustrations by Blanch Fisher Wright, created in 1916, and in the public domain. Rob's redactions and blurred areas of the images completely change the innocent meaning of the original rhymes and pictures. His dedication reads: for changing times and changing meaning. The 32 page book is hand bound and is printed by HP Indigo in a signed and numbered edition of 150.

Here are some images of the cover and a few of the two-page spreads.

Front cover with gold-foil stamped title.

Back cover of The Redacted Mother Goose.

2. Insult Toolbox by Abbey Withey is a book that allows you quick reference to an endless combination of insults that you can hurl at the appropriate person in any situation that requires it. The book is published and hand-bound in a special limited numbered edition of 100 copies. Warning: has explicit language.

The last page has a view of the empty toolbox.

3. Bodies 'n' Type by Jeff Lowry is a flap book, also called an exquisite corpse book, after the Victorian parlour game. It is two- sided: on the left is type that combines to make different sentences that relate to the images on the right side of each spread. The wonderful quirky characters that Jeff has created for the right side are often humorous and sometimes touching and make wonderful combinations. Printed on archival paper by HP Indigo digital printing in a numbered and signed edition of 150 and hand assembled and bound with a special chipboard protective sleeve.

New York Art Book Fair 2012

I will be at the New York Art Book Fair from Thursday, September 27th through Sunday, September 30th, 2012. It takes place at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. I will be sharing a table with François Deschamps and Clif Meador. Our table is hosted by The Purchase College SUNY Center for Editions, who will also have a table next to ours. (A big thank you to Director Ravi Rajan of the Purchase School of Art+Design). We will be located at a great spot on the first floor of PS1.

I will have a number of new books published by Spaceheater Editions this year as well as a couple of other recent titles since 2009. Please come by and visit. The preview is on Thursday evening.

New book is bound and available for sale.

After a number of changes to the structure of Cruising Altitude, which was officially published in October 2011 on the occasion of the New York Artist Book Fair, the edition is mostly bound and is available for sale. It has been published in a hand-bound numbered and signed edition of 50.

SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK:  Cruising Altitude is a dos-á-dos (double-sided) book on one side about wanderlust, travel, and the quest for the exotic. The other side covers the darker angle of travel: of being a stranger or foreigner in another country or culture. The section titled Above explores the desire to travel away from one’s normal and humdrum world, to see and experience the different and the exotic. There are many complex reasons why we want to travel. Part of what drives wanderlust is an impatience with the everyday and the desire to expand one’s horizons, sometimes to destroy one’s comfortable status quo, to escape, to satify one’s curiosity about the world. Travel makes one more tolerant, perhaps even promotes peace between cultures and nations. However Below (the other, mirror, section) is about the flip-side of wanderlust. In this book the traveler, displaced person, or foreigner encounters a virulent and often jingoistic resistance from the inhabitants of the new locations that one enters as a visitor. Terms for ‘the other’, usually derogatory or demeaning, appear over photographic views looking down from airplane windows. Although I believe this to be universal, living in Southern Arizona on the border with Mexico I am very aware of this viewpoint in some of the local state population. In addition to the feelings that I have about this subject derived from my current living location, I was the child of an American diplomat. Although I grew up loving the many different places we lived, I never fit in to any of them, nor felt that any one of the places we lived was my home, always feeling like ‘the other’, and that includes the United States itself.

It is in the form of a double-sided or dos-á-dos binding, one side entitled Above, and the other Below.

Here are some images from the Above side. The views are from the earth, looking up airplanes in the sky:

The other side is called Below and looks down upon the earth, from the vantage point of an airplane window:

 

PRODUCTION MEDIA DETAILS:  The double-sided book interiors were printed by HP Indigo. There are gold and silver metallic foil titles on both covers. The book was bound by hand with archival book board and Kensington premium bonded red leather, designed to look and feel a little like the old Baedeker travel guides that were extremely popular in Europe in the late 1880s through the 1930s. Each book comes in an archival gray phase box.