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  No Safe Levels

  Lise Melhorn-Boe

  "Northern Ontario highways are lined with rock cuts, sometimes covered with graffiti. This pop-up rock cut morphs into the artist’s scarred body." - Transformer Press.

  "This is a rock cut because I love the rock cuts along the highways up north. People do often put graffiti on the rock cuts, so my graffiti on this ‘rock cut’ is all the heavy metals that are in my body and the size of the lead and mercury are much bigger because I had a much higher concentration of those than say, tin. To visualize — this book is cut out in the shape of me lying down on my side, with my leg stretched out. It connects to the quote down at the bottom, which is: 'There is no separation. We are the environment. So whatever we do to the environment, we do to ourselves,' and that’s David Suzuki. So I am part of these rocks, these rocks are a part of me. This is my personal landscape and it’s my body and its intersections with the environment, with nature, with rocks, with metals." - Lise Melhorn-Boe, interview with Cassandra Kuyvenhoven from "The Garbage-loving Environmentalist," found here: http://unevenearth.org/2016/06/the-garbage-loving-environmentalist/

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  Flip Read

  Heather Weston

  Explores the experience of lip reading. The book aims to challenge the hearing person's perceptions and assumptions about how we construct our verbal and visual world and how we make sense of the information available to us. It employs the naturally silent and yet verbal domain, as well as the variable pace that the reader can impose on the read, via the pace of the flick. The statement on the verso alludes to the idea that articulating words (in essence, turning the page more slowly) can aid in understanding (akin to a normal strategy of talking more loudly to a deaf person). The statement of the speaker is not revealed within the book, leaving a doubt in the reader's mind over whether they have understood as much as can be understood, reflecting the inexact science of lip reading. The actual spoken statement is this: "How would you cope with the volume turned off?"

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  Shedding Light

  Heather Weston

  "Explores the book as a tactile object in the extreme and the importance of light and touch within the reading process. Taking away the book's usual visual narrative clues, the seeing reader is left with little traditional visual information with which to decode the presented 'text', but instead is faced with Braille text implicitly inviting them to feel the narrative. Help is provided in the form of a visual Braille alphabet card to assist readers to decipher the Braille and read the narrative that is hidden from conventional view. However, through a thorough physical exploration of the book, the reader may or may not discover a textual narrative on the reverse of the page. By shedding light through the page the book easily slips out of its felt cover and can be held up to the light, the sighted reader is given a textual translation of the Braille, emphasizing the need for light within the reading process. The ambiguous title relates to both the loss of light implied by the Braille, as well as the casting of light across the book needed for the text based reading." - Heather Weston

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  For Seventy Years: Loyal to my Family

  Keiko Ishii

  The third in the series of books by Ishii examining the history of family members that resided in America before, during, and right after World War II. "The back of the 3rd book, For Seventy Years: Loyal to My Family, is based on the Loyalty Test on Japanese internees during the war. This government-issued questionnaire (February 1943) was taken by all adult internees in the camps to verify that they forswear allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor and willing to serve in the United States military. This created a tension between the two generations; the first who were born in Japan and could not become American citizens and the second who were naturally American citizens by being born in the U.S.. The historical documents cause the viewers to imagine the complex feelings of many Japanese-Americans who lived through the era would have. The front of this book is a parallel response to the complex history on a personal level. With the questionnaire beneath the family related documents; birth certificates, area map of Tacoma, WA where they lived, midwives' names from the city directory and so on, it obscures the truth whether my family members were loyal or disloyal to the U.S. from myself as a researcher." - Keiko Ishii

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  Slices

  Emily Martin

  A letterpress printed carousel book constructed of Moriki paper and Thai striped paper. The text is positioned on top of each of the 12 slices; each segment of text contains 50 words. This book was produced in conjunction with the artist’s 50th birthday. Hard cover wrapped in Thai striped paper with an imbedded magnetic strip to hold the cake in its full circle.

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  A Diction

  Heather Weston

  "The book utilizes the page shape of a pint glass, and by doing this, the angled unfolding of the book’s monologue creates a full circle when open that carries the visual and structural metaphor of the cycle of addiction. The paper on which the monologue is printed is Gmund Bier paper which is made of recycled beer labels, pulp and beer fibres (hops, malt and yeast). Production: Offset lithography on paper; book cloth on millboard. A Diction looks at the way we choose to deny our own realities through alcoholism, an addiction that perpetually allows us to disavow our difficulties with the world as we find it. The book reflects the never-ending cycle that is characteristic of any addiction, as the addict continually attempts to grapple with a reality which is uncomfortable and intolerable. What is favoured by the addict is a short-term solution to long-term psychological discomfort at the expense of living in reality and working though the reality’s unpleasant aspects. The result is a repetitive reliance on a diction that controls and restricts what we perceive and feel as real." - Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers, LLC

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  Borges & I

  Heather Weston

  Once again, Heather Weston successfully navigates subtle psychological territory. This self-reflexive story explores the tension between Borges the writer and Borges the man. Weston magnifies that tension by drawing forth subtext from text, dramatizing the split between id and ego, deeper self and public persona. At the same time, the book functions as a metaphor for Borges' experience of going blind in middle age, a subject not directly alluded to in the story. But Weston interprets Borges' refusal to stop reading and writing as a possible cause of his blindness. Thus, both refusal and blindness are themselves symbolic of the split. Black text is printed offset on black paper, and Weston literally brings the subtext forward from Borges sentences by using blind embossing (raised letters). This gives a physical dimension to the page—with an obvious reference to Braille script—that interrupts and hijacks the prose of Borges the writer. The revealed subtext is a bitter and futile monologue, hewn from within the body of the original text. Insightful.

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  Voyage(r): A Tourist Map to Japan

  Clarissa T. Sligh

  "In this diary-like artist's book, Sligh recounts a trip to Japan through a thoughtfully constructed montage of photography, texts, and abstract gestural paintings. In personal and poetic musings, the author ponders her relationship to Japanese culture, both as a firsttime visitor and as an African American woman." - Prospectus

  "This work comes out of a visit with people and places in Japan. It is also based on research of the historical circumstances surrounding the United States’ decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan and reflections on what visiting Hiroshima meant to me as an American." - Clarissa Sligh

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  Conundrum

  Ann Lovett

  "Conundrum uses photographs, historical medical diagrams, and text to address the ways in which the body is framed by history, science, experience, and desire. Exploring the historic scientific text as a site which functions symbolically as the repository of intellectual knowledge, and the skin as sensor and instrument of desire, it questions the persistent paradigm of Cartesian mind/body division. Contrasting and intertwining representations of ‘objective’ scientific inquiry with those of physical experience, memory, and desire, the book raises questions about the nature of knowledge, what is and can be known about human experience, and how that knowledge has been framed historically.

  "Historical anatomy diagrams allude to the conceptual framework of the time in which they were made and the fluidity and instability of scientific knowledge. To look at these diagrams is to examine scientific, political, and social belief; images of the classified, organized corpus become metaphors for the belief that rational analysis can explain and control the individual self. By shifting them from the role of medical history into the context of art, from the classificatory and didactic to the realm of interpretive representation, I intend that readers will consider what kind of information is found here. These diagrams might be seen not only as a tool by which scientists in the past learned about the structure of the body, but also as a symbolic visual representation of a specific paradigm which continues to frame our view of physical experience.

  "Color images emphasize skin as the container of the body and the self, as the barrier which separates self from other, and as a cognitive tool for transmitting the sense of touch and perceiving the world. Within these multiple roles of containment and protection, exposure and disguise, pain and pleasure, the skin is in a state of constant renewal, recording aging, injury, and healing, the text of experience. These images give voice to the sensual and evocative body, the experience of vibrant, fluid physicality.

  "The cover text is a mirror image of Descartes’ treatise on the mind and the body." — Ann Lovett

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  Bent Like the River

  Terry Schupbach-Gordon

  A short, lyrical poem is brought to life by a series of powerful woodcuts. The contents celebrates and affirms the lives of people living with disabilities. The rhythmic quality of the verse is echoed by the syncopated marks of the gouge and the movement of the bodies and waterways depicted over the pages.