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  Reimagining the Narrative Through Pictures: Interracial Perspective

  Holly Jefferies

  "Reimagining the Narrative Through Pictures captures snapshots of the experimental creative writing within my art scrolls. Each picture encapsulates a piece of the experimental erasures, extractions of text, and streams of consciousness from each scroll in the collection, Reimagining the Narrative: A Contemporary Creative Collection of Interracial Perspective. As the viewer stands before the scrolls and their eyes scan and collect phrases and profound thoughts about interracial relations, they must walk away with only glimpses of the reimagined narrative. The snapshots within this visual collection of pictures allows the viewer to take away more of the collection than the mind can capture, allowing further contemplation and conversation. With this collection of pictures, the viewer may continue to engage with the narrative so that the words and images can be woven into the viewers’ own narratives just as they are reimagined and stitched into each scroll. As the artist and writer, I reimagine the narratives that have been told through history, and retell them through a new lens for the viewer, and I invite the viewer to do the same. Welcome to an experience in reimagining the narrative of interracial relations through pictures." - https://reimaginethenarrative.com/publishedwriting/

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  Corruption

  Christopher Kit Maddox

  Corruption by Christopher Kit Maddox is an anthology of ten hostile statements made by powerful world leaders. Each chapter relays the message from 80 languages via machine translation systems, gradually transforming hateful speech into vague and powerless quotations. The final page of each chapter concludes with a revitalized poetic interpretation of the chapter’s message. Vibrant and busy spreads balance the intense, word-heavy collections of art as text, bringing process poetry to life. The book includes a small pamphlet insert entitled "We Will Bury You," explaining the actual meaning and misinterpretations behind the infamous quote of Nikita Khrushchev where intent was lost through translation and interpretation.

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  Talisman (Deluxe Edition)

  Ellen Knudson

  Talisman is an artist’s book about the struggle of artistic isolation.

  "Talisman is an offering in support of artists and creative people that might be feeling alone in the world these days. Since 2016, as an artist (and as a human being) I have found it difficult to feel motivated while the worst traits of humanity have not only surfaced in our country, but are being celebrated. Writers and artists before us have lived through similarly poisonous times and created iconic works despite the tumultuous climate. Talisman is an amulet, a charm to keep with us. The linocut image of the boat-tailed grackle is intended to be a familiar spirit to guide us through rough territory. In times like these, it helps to keep our friends close." — Ellen Knudson

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  64 Sacred Views

  Tanja Koljonen

  In the book images are replaced with 64 words or sentences. The minimal, non-linear storyline hovers from general descriptions of a landscape and nature into more abstract views on human mind, memory and communication. Many sacred sites are loaded with mythohistorical narratives that make them appear as scenes and stages for history. Therefore, apart from being religious and historical touchstones, they are also powerful sociopolitical statements. When all the narratives of certain places are erased, the images and the story are left to be conjured by the reader and the world is to be constructed from within.

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  Cross Words

  Emily Martin

  Cross Words is an 8-page paper book by Emily Martin. The front cover displays the title "Cross Words" and the end cover contains an artist message. The structure of the print is a simple crossword, placed in the center of each page. Martin uses the paper to create a book based on diverse subject matter related to social, cultural, and political issues, including but not limited to Christianity, missionaries, globalization, and world cultures. This book is made of a specialized paper provided by Andrew Honey, a conservator at the Bodleian Library in Fall 2018.

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  One Hundred Excellent Flowers

  Clifton Meador

  This piece is a very innovative and encouraging way to take a look at issues that have long plagued relationships between people and their leaders. This work references a speech that was given by Mao Zedong in 1957, titled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People." Within this speech, Mao referenced letting 100 flowers bloom, a poetic phrase intended to promote and invite the citizens to vocalize their criticism on the Communist leadership at the time. Following this speech, an anti-rightist movement erupted in China wherein all of the people who were “enticed” by this poem and promise of understanding were publicly shamed or stripped of all of their assets. Meador’s approach to the topic stemmed from anger within his own life. He decided the work “One Hundred Excellent Flowers” should discuss this sense of “trickery” in a more modernized and Americanized fashion: how politics and marketing lie to the American consumer. Meador attempts to display processed snack foods in the same light that the flowers were displayed within Zedong’s speech. Meador wanted to suck the audience in and make them understand that consumerism is a temptation and a seduction that we should avoid before it is too late and we have lost ourselves and our bodies to the entities that are beginning to kill us.

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  Everything Has a Language

  Marnie Powers-Torrey

  "Printed from around 75 found objects, this book sculpture is a conglomerate of the past and a document of the here and now. Each of these objects carries its own narrative, inherent to its current shape and surface, told through stamped ink. The form is Hedi Kyle's interlocking loops structure." — Marnie Powers-Torrey Powers-Torrey lets objects speak for themselves, perhaps even among themselves. It is up to the human reader to make their own meaning, and both the artist and reader leave their mark on the book as they do this. The balance of this deeply personal, embodied meaning-making with the sense that the book’s images recede infinitely beyond translation is a productive and enjoyable tension.

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  (UN)NATURAL

  Claudia Prado

  "As said by Krystyna Wasserman, 'to make books is to create physical form for ideas,' and this artist book embodies that ideology as it focuses on the ideas I have formed through a college semester learning about the different perspectives and argumentations on the ethics of biomedical enhancements, the specifics of gene mutation, make-up, replication, and the such, as well as laboratory research on gene editing using CRISPR technology. One argumentation opposing biomedical enhancements that eluded me was the idea that these interventions were wrong because they were unnatural, and by implementing them we were taking for granted the giftedness of a life we weren’t wholly responsible for having. So, the two-sided accordion named 'NATURAL' AND 'UNNATURAL' show how on one hand what is perceived as a ‘natural’ gene mutation in the body can come to damage it by creating cancerous cells, and on the other hand what is perceived as an ‘unnatural’ gene edit and mutation using CRISPR technology can be implemented to kill cancerous cells and cure someone of the disease. The square, solid, and symmetrical structure of the accordion reference the solidity of gene framework, while also addressing the equal importance of both perspectives on the matter. The cartoony style of the images and the included explanatory text are a way of allowing a broader audience unfamiliar to the biological specifics of gene mutation/editing to understand the processes to thoroughly question if the natural is truly good and the unnatural fundamentally bad, and what it could mean when questioning the ethics of biomedical enhancements." — Claudia Prado

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  On the Verge: Florida Scrub Jay

  Maryann Riker

  "'On the Verge' is a series of artist's books that follows the original series of 'Winged Ghosts' that encompassed extinct bird species. This series explores bird species that are 'on the verge' of extinction as defined by the National Audubon Society. Bird numbers can be lower than 10,000 or as low as a mating pair. 'On the Verge: Florida Scrub Jay' is a continuation of the Winged Ghosts artist book series on extinct bird species and "The Immigration/Invasive Species" artist books that compared immigration waves to invasive bird species introduced into New York City. I chose to use the old book covers with miniature handles and file label holders to replicate the look of vintage scientific specimen drawers and old ledger journals. This particular artist book highlighting the plight of the Florida scrub jay speaks to the causes of its endangered species status according to the National Audubon Society. Birds are the first link to reflect changes in environment and they serve as a warning sign to humanity as to how pesticides, urban encroachment, and climate change can devastate a species or change its natural environment. With a poem by Nancy Scott, Easton, PA, entitled 'Count Up, Count Down'.'" -Maryann Riker

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  Set of Zines: Women of NASA

  Maryann Riker

  "Celebrating the women of NASA who put men in space and on the moon, these 5 zines honor those who worked behind the scenes, became astronauts and lost their lives in the pursuit of science. This one-sheet book structure with various pink-shaded-cardstock covers also includes an acrostic poem by Nancy Scott of Easton, PA. The Women of NASA zines were inspired by my friend, Nancy Scott, poet and essayist who resides in Easton, PA (there is another Nancy Scott who resides in Trenton, NJ and is also a poet). Nancy is blind (has been blind since birth) and is also a NASA nerd who listens to NASA TV to report on space walks, missions, etc., which is then rebroadcast across the country through a service providing news to the visually impaired. I have included Nancy's poetry in many of my artist books. When discussing possible zine ideas, she had mentioned the 50th anniversary of the first woman working for NASA and NASA's celebration of this landmark. So I decided to commemorate the women of NASA and do a zine set dedicated to them. And, this is the result." - Maryann Riker

  Zines: The Human Computers, Spacey Women, Spacey Women 2, Spacey Women 3, In Memoriam

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  The Gaze Measured

  Maryann Riker

  "This artist book celebrates the unnamed and unknown women photographers who ran portrait studios, documented landscapes and took selfies! The only documentation are the photographs they left behind. Entrepreneurs and selfie takers documented their world while giving women the chance to use the newest technology! The book was inspired by an article regarding women and the lasting images they created at the turn of the century and yet who remained unnamed. History regarded the first selfie taken by a man in Philadelphia but no woman was recorded except for a few who propelled the new medium and made commercial successes from their ventures into it. Having studied photography at a time when one developed their own images, it was amazing that for the amount of women who took photography, many were not included in fine art photography exhibitions or counted as important in their field until after the women's movement. How sad...so, this is my little ode commemorating them and their endeavors.

  "The front cover is an actual brownie camera front with a woman gazing out at us measuring up for the perfect snap! Enjoy this book designed as a photo book in its images of the early unnamed female pioneers of photography.

  "Includes a poem by Nancy Scott, Easton, PA." - Maryann Riker

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  Temporada

  Rosaura Rodríguez

  "Narrativa gráfica ilustrada autobiográfica sobre el Huracán María en Puerto Rico." Autobiographical illustrated graphic narrative about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

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  REF

  Shift-Lab Members

  A collaboration between the five artists of Shift-lab, REF takes a simultaneously playful and critical look at how we ask questions and seek answers. The reference section in the library may seem obsolete in today’s digital information landscape, but in the past, a researcher could make discoveries by walking down an aisle of books or opening flat files of maps; research was an in-person sensory experience that our modern practice of typing keywords doesn’t provide. The variety of printing and binding structures in REF exudes a palpable love that all book artists have for the materials with which we make books. Though the booklets do not actually provide useful, coherent information, they do provide a thoughtful way back into the seductive charm of the unexpected discoveries one can make when browsing the reference section.

  "As we designed our responses to traditional elements of the reference section, we used several dates as loose organizational principles to tie our work together:

  1963: The publication of Automation and the Library of Congress

  1991: The Gore Bill, which led to the World Wide Web as we know it today

  1993: the publication of Planning Second Generation Automated Library Systems and the release of Mosaic, the web browser that popularized the World Wide Web

  2001: the arrival of Wikipedia.

  "Reference sources evolved slowly to answer specific types of questions that emerged over time as people sought to engage with information. These types of questions, asked repeatedly for many hundreds of years, were the catalyst for the production of the 15 standard types of printed reference that we were responding to. We each worked as leads on between one and four components, sometimes individually, sometimes collaborating with other Shift-lab members. We kept a google doc of all of our sources, materials, sizes, and images. Our aim was to create a reference section that operated the same way a library reference section would operate: creating and highlighting linkages, and answering (or posing) multiple questions about related material.

  "Where possible, we used our selected dates and sources as material content for our components. Repeated language, names, materials, and images crop up in multiple places. The Bibliography, itself a traditional reference type, became a natural place to list our sources for the project." — Shift-Lab members

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  Units

  Sara Smith

  "Units is a set of 27 letterpress printed cards in a folded enclosure. The concept is based on the repurposing of architecture and the seemingly interchangeable lives conducted within. On one side of the cards is the outside of a building (loosely based on downtown White River Junction, VT). The other side of the cards show the people and activity on the inside. Some cards even show the top and bottom views of the goings on. The cards are slotted to allow assembly of different buildings and configuration of occupants. Pen and ink illustrations, letterpress printed with photo polymer plates on French Speckletone paper." - https://mcbaprize.org/sarah-smith-units/

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  Memory Lame

  Jessica Spring

  Memory Lame focuses on retention and loss of memory. The book structure must be built by the reader with content emanating from a central, pentagonal memory palace—the most common mnemonic place system—aided by cues of geometric shapes and large numerals. Surrounding the palace are excerpts from Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest known book on rhetoric and memory. Billy Collins’ poem “Forgetfulness” is repeated in each chapter, the text moving from black to gray as the reader circles the book. Common mnemonic devices tease the memory, printed on sheets of handmade Saint-Armand. Tucked in each chapter are illustrations of plants that improve cognitive function, printed on transparent abaca. Text set in geometric shapes share the author’s grueling experience of cognitive and memory testing.

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  Xenagogy X

  Jessica Spring

  "X has never been common in the English language, and just .02 percent of the dictionary begins with this rare letter. For letterpress printers using wood type, the X is often missing from a font, or the poor sort has had its reverse side surrendered for carving a sorely needed A or E instead. During a residency at Shooting Star Press in Little Rock, Arkansas, I had the opportunity to explore the huge wood type collection, full of rare and exotic specimens. Inspired by the extraordinary xenodochy (hospitality) of my hosts in contrast to our country’s disturbing xenophobia (fear of foreigners), I set out to create Xenagogy X, a guidebook. Words led by the letter X are surrounded by their definitions and framed by X specimens, all bound in an X-cordion. An independent variable, an unknown value, the letter X serves to expand and excite." - Jessica Spring

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  One Day - Un Día

  Alex Apella

  "One Day is a book about death and also about hope. The bilingual collages document/portray the raw, loving, brutal, sensitive, intense story of the last day of Alex’s grandfather’s life, which he photographed without knowing it, and the last days of her mother's life, as she succumbed to Leukemia. Trying to describe the book in its poetic and visual depth may be as difficult as trying to describe the feelings and emotions surrounding the departure-farewell of a loved one. The first person narrative Alex uses to tell her story is a visual, bilingual, layered voice of her own creation that she has been building book by book in recent years. Her way of combining Spanish and English simultaneously, the two languages in which she speaks and thinks every day, situates the reader in a place of uncomfortable commitment, and obligates us to face both languages, and to discover just how much we actually do understand. Alex documents the story with photographs from her family archive, which dialogue with each other, interweaving senses that travel from one photo to the next and that the reader completes with their own images / memories, inevitably envisioned as the pages are turned. Alex's book will make you return to those moments, with sadness, with tears of emotion, and you will feel accompanied. You will understand that the devastating impotence of not being able to do anything except be present as events unfold, somehow unites us as humanity. That time heals, that remembering and looking back strengthens. That we are not alone." - Barbi Couto

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  Hinde

  Zven Balslev

  N/A

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  Home

  Christine Cole

  This zine was printed in Futura Font by Rollins Print Services to exhibit at the Orlando Zine Fest on December 15, 2018 in Orlando, Florida. An exploration of the idea of who, what, how, where, before, now, what could be "home." Collected and designed by Christine Cole, @stinecole.

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  #Great Again #Believe Me

  Karen Hanmer

  "From Access Hollywood through the Mueller investigation to white nationalist support, the Jacob’s Ladder #Great Again #Believe Me documents contemporary American personalities, pronouncements, slogans, scandals, policies and crimes, complemented by the metaphor of a deconstructing US Capitol. Housed in clamshell of archival board." - https://abecedariangallery.com/store/product/karen-hanmer-great-again-believe-me/

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  Nature Nurture

  Lyall Harris

  Close-up images are paired in a series of photographs by the artist to illustrate similarities between objects from the natural world and her young children. Intriguing parallels are drawn in this image-only accordion.

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  After

  Josh Hockensmith

  Hockensmith employs black-out poetry and ghostly afterimages in reference to the ephemerality of books and art objects in our digital age. On the first side, Hockensmith pairs text with faded photographs of portraits and found objects from a collector’s portfolio; occupying the second side are the artist’s own photographic images depicting nature and death. Seen through sheets of translucent paper, these “after” images reference the phenomenon of seeing the inverted version of an image after exposure to the original has ceased. Poems by the 15th-century Japanese Zen monk Ikkyu are blacked-out with gold and black ink over letterpress-printed text, allowing one to read both the original and revised versions of poems by two creators separated by several hundred years of existence.

  "After is about the life of the book in the digital age and the transitory nature of all things. It’s structured in two sections using a dos-a-dos binding. The first section features photos of ghostly afterimages left behind on the glassine sheets protecting plates in a 1929 art history catalog. The real world intrudes at the end of the first section when a thumb appears in the image. As the reader flips to the second side of the dos-a-dos, the imagery pivots to include afterimages of different kinds from the outside world.

  "The text in the book is a blackout poem I created using a sequence of poems by 15th-century Japanese Zen monk Ikkyu as the source text. The original sequence – titled Skeletons – is an extended exploration of the same transitory theme as After. I letterpress printed the Ikkyu poems in their entirety from polymer plates before creating the new, book-length blackout poem by brushing over certain words with a combination of sumi ink and gold calligraphy ink.

  "The English version of Skeletons is a translation by the great John Stevens, from Wild ways: Zen poems (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2003), used with the generous permission of the publisher. The book that I photographed the afterimages of artworks from is A catalogue of paintings in the collection of Jules S. Bache (New York: privately printed, 1929).

  "I composed the blackout poem as an 'intentional' poem, but I use chance methods to determine which color ink to use when brushing words out: black or gold. For that, I use a printed sheet of randomized numbers between 1-4 that was created by John Cage and my mentor Stephen Addiss for a project they did together in the 1990’s. The numbers determine how many words I black out in one color before switching to the other. Each copy of the book has a different pattern of blackout coloration." — Josh Hockensmith

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  Existential Jukebox

  L. K. James

  Existential Jukebox is a collection of drawings, sketches, and phrases that are printed on sketching paper. "In the spring of 2018, I printed and published a 100-page book using a RC 6300 Risograph at Outlet. The publication is a collection of drawings and writing called Existential Jukebox: self-portrait in the year of the dog. " - L.K. James

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  Kompendium 37

  Åse Eg Jørgensen

  In the 19th century Norwegian sawmills started to produce ready-made houses in kit form for export. Norwegian businessmen established in Seyðisfjörður started importing these buildings — both as homes, business premises and public buildings. The many preserved, colorful, Norwegian-style wooden houses covered in corrugated iron, render Seyðisfjörður unique in Iceland.

  Import to Iceland of corrugated iron from England began in 1870. First it was used on roofs mainly, but soon the locals also started to clad walls with it in order to protect the timber. After the turn of the 20th century, following "Bruninn mikli" or "the Great Fire" that destroyed 12 houses in central Reykjavik, regulations were changed to avoid further catastrophes. Regulations demanded fireproof material fo rbuilding and corrugated iron provided the perfect shell. Light, strong, resistant and inexpensive, the corrugated iron also protects the timber beneath from harsh weather conditions, while letting it breathe, thus providing a natural ventilation system of sorts.

  The photos in this compendium are depicting gables rather than facades of the buildings, showing the ease with which a wooden structure can be penetrated with windows — or covered up. The forms, the rythms and the proximity of the mountains are exceedingly playful.

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  202-456-1111

  Jason Lazarus

  "Since the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States, I have been creating photograms. The text that repeats throughout these images, 202-456-1111, is the White House phone number, which began the current administration disconnected. I’m not sure if photograms is the exact term for these works. A friend called them chemigrams, but after looking it up, I learned that chemigrams are made in full light. These are made quickly, like a protest sign, and in the dark. They are made with arms and legs that have a rare congenital condition, arthrogryposis, the same one that NY Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski—who 45 mocked on November 25, 2015—lives with. The repetition of resistance requires very close scrutiny. The lives of the targets of this administration are infinite, complex, and irreducible. When we become students of these lives, as well as our own, the multitude of details we discover implores us to become more fully formed and in formation with each other." - Jacob Lazarus, 2018