The Art of the Book, Seager Gray Gallery, 2013

THE ART OF THE BOOK Exhibition of handmade artist books, altered books and book-related materials

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THE ART OF THE BOOK Eighth annual exhibition of handmade artist books, altered books and book-related materials

23 Sunnyside Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 415.384.8288 seagergray.com

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The Art of the Book Eighth Annual Exhibition of Artists’ Books, Altered Books and Book-related Materials

Jody Alexander, Rhiannon Alpers, Kim Anno, Doug Beube, Joy Broom, Sarah Bryant, Macy Chadwick, Julie Chen, Cathy DeForest, John DeMerritt, Marie Dern, Jessica Drenk, Alisa Golden, Andrew Hayes, Charles Hobson, Richard Kamler, Byron B. Kim, Lisa Kokin, Kumi Korf, Gyöngy Laky, Guy Laramée, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Claudia Marseille, Mary V. Marsh, Jennifer McKnight, Judy O’Shea, Michael O’Shea, Nora Pauwells, Maria Porges, Felicia Rice, Isaac G. Salazar, Paolo Salvagione, Erin K. Schmidt, Anik Vinay, Danielle Giudici Wallis and Michelle Wilson Exhibition Dates: May 1 - May 31, 2013 Reception for the Artists: Friday, May 3, 6 to 8 PM Front Cover: Jacqueline Rush Lee, Anthologia (Devotion Series) Back Cover:: Julie Chen, Cat’s Cradle Photography Credits: Jody Alexander - photos by R. R. Jones Joy Broom - photos by Jerry Leisure Andrew Hayes - photos by Steve Mann Lisa Kokin - photos by Lia Roozendaal/Jagwire Design, Kumi Korf - photos by Noni Korf Gyöngy Laky - photos by Ben Blackwell Jacqueline Rush Lee - photos by Paul Kodama, Hawaii Nora Pauwels and John DeMerritt - photos by Kim Harrington All other photos provided by the artists themselves Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 23 Sunnyside Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 415.384.8288 art@seagergray.com

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The Art of the Book We are pleased to present our eighth exhibition of book-related arts. When I opened my gallery those many years ago, I knew that I wanted to specialize in these works. My hope was to create a bridge between the “book world” and the contemporary art world with the goal of seeing exhibitions in major art museums as well as special collections libraries. Now collectors and artists alike make their pilgrimage to Mill Valley for this annual exhibition in May. The goal is to explore every approach possible, from sublime fine press offerings and altered books to even broader conceptual uses of books that explore our associations to their form, content and physical presence.

What is it about the book that inspires us to mount these complex exhibitions year after year? The answer is “everything.” Everything about books engages us - the content, the paper, the form, the bindings, the printmaking, the materials, all of it. Books are linked to our earliest experiences and so much of our learning. They take us to places we may never have been. They teach, they comfort, they provide. Sometimes they challenge and confront.

All of that can be used in the hands of an artist. Great art inspires multiple associations. The associations we have with books are rich and varied, They provide us with a vehicle for literature, poetry, art, and knowledge, giving us a form to hold meaning, a constant physical presence in our lives.

In the hands of an artist, books are the perfect material. They have shape, color, variation and content. We are excited this year to have works by artists Jacqueline Rush Lee, Guy Laramée, Byron B. Kim, Jessica Drenk and Andrew Hayes, all new to our exhibition. They examine the book as a material, keeping enough of the form to access that mother lode of associations, but playing with it in original ways, breaking through to new aesthetic dimensions.

We also have books that are new handmade unique or edition works, created by artists for whom the book is their primary medium. These artists, with their considerable technical skills, explore the book in search of ways to design the form in harmony with the content. Julie Chen, Charles Hobson, Alisa Golden, Macy Chadwick and Kumi Korf are among these. Books are interactive by nature. By turning each page, you move into an orchestrated experience. By varying the form, artists find ways of presenting new interactions with the content. You may find yourself opening envelopes or unfolding and refolding pages to discover the text. When those interactions replicate the content of the book, they offer elements of surprise and discovery and treat you to a heightened experience of the work.

This dizzying variety of book-related works represents an exciting genre in art. The best way to enjoy these works is to own them. They offer more than can be taken in at first sight. It is a feeling of privilege and intimacy to have them for yourself and your sensibilities become refined with every interaction.

Donna Seager, April, 2013

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Jody Alexander San Francisco Bay Area

Jody Alexander is an artist, bookbinder, papermaker, librarian and teacher who lives and works in Santa Cruz, California.

She makes paper, in the Eastern-style, and uses her papers to bind books with exposed sewing on the spine in a number of historical and modern binding styles. She combines these books with found objects, wooden boxes and drawers, metal, bones, etc. to create sculptural works. Her pieces celebrate collecting, storytelling, and odd characters. She also likes to rescue books in distress and give them new life as rebound books, scrolls and sculptural pieces Top from left to right: She Pours out Tears, discarded book, found book page, photograph, chemistry glass, salt, fabric, thread, 7.5 x 5.5 x 1”, 2012 A Sensation of Touch, discarded book, found book page, photograph, security envelopes, fabric, thread, 7.5 x 5.5 x 1”, 2012 Often it is Necessary, discarded book, found book page, photograph, chemistry glass, salt, fabric, thread, 7.5 x 5.5 x 1”, 2012

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Jody Alexander has taught book arts at San Francisco Center for the Book,The Center for the Book in New York City and University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work appears in a number of publications including Masters: Book Arts: Major Works by Leading Artists, 500 Handmade Books, and the recently published 1000 Artists’ Books: Exploring the Book as Art. Wall Book Series These pieces offer a playful look at the relationship between words, images and objects. The presented juxtaposition in these pieces lend a new meaning to photographs which have lost their families, words that have been borrowed from their intended context and objects that have been displaced.

In their current arrangement new stories emerge.

When the Breath is Held, discarded book, found book page, photograph, security envelopes, fabric, thread, 5.5 x 7.5 x 1�, 2012

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Rhiannon Alpers San Francisco Bay Area

Rhiannon Alpers is a papermaker, letterpress printer and book artist.

Rhiannon has an MFA in Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago and a BA in Book Arts from UC Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies.

She has taught workshops and college courses at San Francisco Center for the Book, Sonoma Community Center, Kala Printmaking Institute, Academy of Art University of San Francisco, Stanford University, Filoli Gardens Estate, Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, Feather River Art Camp, Center for Book and Paper in Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy.

Specimen Series These one of a kind artist books straddle the line between book and box, and were inspired by the scientific logs and collections of the 1600s in Europe.

The materials were all found and collected by the artist to create a visual narrative in the form of a miniature cabinet of curiosities.

Specimen Series: Callithea Leprieuri (upper left and right) hand crafted wooden padauk frame, butterfly specimen (Callithea Leprieuri), handmade paper (dill, palm bark, tulip stems, overbeaten abaca), material samples in glass tubes (iron oxide, vertebrae bone fragments), batik handmade bookcloth, silk bookcloth, found antique clippings and accounting log scraps. 4.25 x 6 x 2.5�,2013 Specimen Series: Cyrestis Strigata (lower left and right) found 1920s Italian/English translation dictionary, handmade paper (overbeaten abaca), silk bookcloth, seed pods, rose hips, found account log scraps and decorated papers. 3 x 4 x 1.5�, 2013

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Kim Anno

San Francisco Bay Area

Kim Anno is an internationally exhibited artist. She creates large format photography and stages experimental video projects around the world. Her work is collected by museums such as the SFMOMA, Honolulu Academy of Fine Art Museum, Oakland Museum, Brooklyn Museum, among many others. She has been awarded a Zellerbach Foundation Fellowship, Open Circle Foundation Fellowship, Fleischacker Foundation Award, James R. Knight Foundation Fellowship, Astraea Foundation Fellowship, and the St. Benedict’s Literary Press Artists’ Book Fellowship with poet Anne Carson. She is currently a professor at the California College of the Arts.

Kim Anno brought this intriguing book to us at the gallery and we jumped down the rabbit hole, learning about Marguerite Porete, the French Mystic and her intense, even jealous love of God, to the annihilation of the self.

Every detail of the book, from its fiery cloth binding replicating Porete’s eventual burning at the stake, to the chorus, written in Latin and English engages us in the fierce, almost maniacal devotion to the God of her imagination. Anno’s images are contemporary and evocative, suggesting the universality of the longing for the kind of ecstatic experience that transcends ordinary consciousness.

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The Mirror of Simple Souls is a hand made libretto for an experimental opera. Anne Carson wrote the poems or arias, and Kim Anno made the images. The story is about a medieval heretic name Marguerite Porete, who wrote an ecstatic text called The Mirror of Simple Souls. She advocated against church hierarchy, had followers, and was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. The book is cited as one the primary texts of the medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit.

This opera was also a live performance that was produced in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Published May 1, 2003 this book is the inaugural imprint of One Crow Press at the Literary Arts Institute of the College of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, Minnesota. Multimedia print production is by and under the direction of Mary Jo Pauly.

The text is printed from handset Twentieth Century and Caslon Bold on Rives heavyweight and Mohawk vellum.

Longstitch binding, in red walnut-dyed handmade stock by Cave Paper, executed by Sara Langworthy. In the standard edition of 40 copies.” (from the colophon).

The Mirror of Simple Souls handmade artist book, 12 3/4 x 10 1/4 x 1 1/2�, 2003

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Doug Beube New York, New York

Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist who works in collage, installation, sculpture and photography. He is an independent curator as well as the curator of a private collection for Allan Chasanoff in New York City entitled, The Book Under Pressure, which utilizes the book for purposes other than their utilitarian form. Doug teaches classes in mixed-media, artist’s books and photography and is invited to lecture at universities and art programs. He teaches in the photography department at Parsons The New School and is a graduate advisor at the School for the Visual Arts in New York City.

Doug exhibits both nationally and internationally and his bookworks and photographs are in numerous private and public collections.

The publication of a recent monograph about Beube’s thirty-year practice of bookwork, collage and mixed media is irreverently altered by cutting, gouging and collaging the original book. The aggressive modification of his own publication is ironically contemptuous. By surgically cutting into both the front and backside of Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, as if it’s an archeological dig or medical dissection, reveals the different layers of his artwork. Like the red indices of a dictionary, for example, that organizes the letters of the alphabet, the thinly sliced pages of my bookwork reveals a summary of various colorful chapters and illegible texts. Not until viewers turn the pages of the book do they see the interventions between the reproductions, written text, cut and gouged out pages that disrupt an unhindered read. The reader is constantly reminded that the surface of each page is expandable (and expendable) or references another; it’s not solid, it’s a fluid space. As metaphor, each oblong cut becomes a ‘hyperlink,’ a subtext to previous and forthcoming pages.

The Collector’s Series of 25 unique bookworks are housed in individual clamshell boxes with the original publication, two dust jackets (one peeled and one unpeeled bookmark), a wooden stand and an altered version of the publication entitled, Doug Beube: ReBreaking the Codex.

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Doug Beube: Re-Breaking the Codex altered book, box, collage, wooden stand, 12 x 12 x 3�, 2013

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Joy Broom San Francisco Bay Area

Joy Broom creates extravagant, layered, 3-dimensional specimen boxes which combine her intricate line drawings of organic elements with actual insects, seed pods, branches, body references, antique maps and biological medical sources, all covered with purified beeswax. She presents us with a skewed Natural History Museum, a Cabinet of Curiosities, and further reflections of a broader natural universe Broom earned her BA degree and MFA degree in art from Washington State University. She began teaching at Diablo Valley College in 1975, and taught for 32 years, retiring in 2007.

Correspondence Old letters, biological illustrations, specimen and corsage pins, artificial tree, beeswax, 33 x 31”, 2012

Correspondence is adorned and layered with beeswaxed insect shapes cut out of medical illustrations and old family letters written by both my parents during the 1940’s and 50’s. The piece marries the contexts of personal family history with those of a broader biological natural universe.

Joy Broom has exhibited her work in numerous galleries throughout the Bay Area and the West Coast. She describes herself as a “compulsive drawer of intuitive biology.” She was awarded a WESTAF/NEA Regional Fellowship for Visual Artists, for Works on Paper.

This is part of a body of work which ties together an earlier series using combined biological drawings and actual insects and natural ephemera in rich tableaus, with old family papers, letters and photographs.

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Sarah Bryant Brighton, England

Big Jump Press is the imprint of book artist Sarah Bryant. Under this name, she produces letterpress printed artists’ books, prints, broadsides, and handbound books. Having received her BFA from Vassar College, she started Big Jump in 2005 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama while an MFA student at the University of Alabama, and moved to Upstate New York in 2008 while teaching letterpress and bookbinding as the Victor Hammer Fellow at Wells College. She recently moved to Brighton in the United Kingdom where she continues teaching and creating new works. She has lectured and shown her works at Universities and book centers throughout the United States and now in England.

Fond Letterpress printed from polymer plates on Zerkall paper, 28 pages. Drum leaf in slipcase, 7 1/4 x 4 1/8 x 5/8�

Edition of 75, 65 regular, 10 deluxe, 2012

Fond is an investigation of memory and archive as manifested by the small, valueless objects that individuals collect and preserve. These objects, casually assembled over the course of years, serve as an information retrieval system and an emotional bank. A fond is a collection of documents organically accumulated by a person or institution. Using halftone photographs, color silhouettes, and a winding rope of text, she constructed a history of several objects.

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Macy Chadwick & Jennifer McKnight San Francisco Bay Area

Macy Chadwick publishes artist’s books and limited-edition prints under the imprint In Cahoots Press in Oakland, California. Through her work she addresses themes of memory, personal communication and visual language systems. She is interested in the connection between people: interactions both verbal and non-verbal, shared experiences, and the urge to communicate clearly.

Macy Chadwick is originally from Rhode Island and now resides in Oakland, California. She received an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and assisted book artist Julie Chen at Flying Fish Press in Berkeley for three years. She currently teaches classes at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco Center for the Book. Her work is in prominent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale University Special Collections, and University of Washington.

Observations on Listening, In Audio Pursuit of the Big Fish is a limited edition artist’s book inspired by listening to audio books, specifically to classic literature. Different from reading, we have to pursue an audio book with careful, tense listening.

The story line becomes our prey: we chase it, lose it, and find its line again.

Observations on Listening artist’s book: letterpress, silkscreen, 11.25 x 8.25” edition of 40, 2013

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Printed on the top layer of translucent pocket pages is the story line, where our audio story’s plot lives.

Inside these pockets, the brightly colored interior cards serve as a dual metaphor; they represent both the hidden landscapes of the deep sea, and also the internal vibrations of the story.

Observations on Listening was created, designed and printed by Macy Chadwick and Jennifer McKnight in 2012. The text was written by the artists, with additional text quoted from Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The pocket pages were letterpress printed with pressure prints and polymer plates on Eames paper. The interior cards were screen printed and letterpress printed on Strathmore Wove paper. The binding is based on the storage book format by Hedi Kyle, with a tyvek spine and hard covers.

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Julie Chen San Francisco Bay Area

Julie Chen is a Book Artist who lives in Berkeley, CA. After completing a degree in printmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, Chen became intrigued by the language, equipment, and materials of Book Arts and entered the Book Arts program at Mills College.

Book Arts encompass binding, letterpress, printing and printmaking, combined with three-dimensional art. The finished products are unique three-dimensional pieces of art that include text.

Chen’s books are considered exceptional for their craft and quality, while playfully teasing the conceptual limits of books.

Always mindful of the reader who will interact with her structures, she selects paper to delight the eye and appeal to the touch, while creating forms that function as “vessels” for text, images, ideas and meaning. Despite the nontraditional forms it often occupies, the text in Chen’s creations is letterpress printed.

In addition to teaching Book Arts at Mills College and operating Flying Fish Press, Chen regularly lectures on bookmaking and teaches workshops nationwide.

Cat’s Cradle artist’s book: letterpress, silkscreen, 11.25 x 8.25” edition of 50, 2013

Cat’s Cradle translates thoughts about the nature of existence from idea to form by employing the book structure itself as a visual/physical model of concepts portrayed in the text. The book as object can be displayed in two distinct ways: circularly or linearly. This dual display feature contributes it’s own conceptual meaning to the book as a whole

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The idea for Cat’s Cradle was generated using the Artists’ Book Ideation Cards by Barbara Tetenbaum and Julie Chen.

To inaugurate the publication of this card set, Barb and Julie invited a group of book artists to each make a book that was inspired by a drawing of the cards. The resulting books were shown at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley In February and March of 2013 as an exhibition entitled “Ideation by Chance”. The cards drawn for Cat’s Cradle included the following: Text: self-generated Imagery: none Paper: neutral Color: least favorite Technique: digital Layout: across the fold Structure: Innovative binding Adjectives: mysterious, spiritual, encyclopedic, organic, lyrical

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Cathy DeForest Ashland, Oregon

Cathy DeForest is a book artist inspired by found objects and nature. She works in a broad range of media integrating etchings, letterpress printing and photography into artist books. She enjoys using the age old presses and techniques of printmaking, like the artists who began this work in the fifteenth century. Her artist books integrate each of her forms of art including her original poetry. Cathy’s work is part of numerous University and Museum Collections.

Ink and Blood is a collection of four books within a painted portfolio. Each book is dedicated to a different aspect of the Iraqi culture: the invasion by the Mongols in 1258, the rich culture of Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization, the bombing of Baghdad’s ancient bookseller street in 2007, and a dedication to the “Republic of the Imagination”.

Artist Statement: I felt the need to hand ink each of the thirty-eight pages for each edition to honor those who died for the love of books.

Multiple background plates were made for each of the four books, and nineteen intaglio solar plates were created to contain the narrative of the book. Ink and Blood is an edition of 8 and is dedicated to the people of Iraq and their long-lived culture. This excerpt captures the essence of my gratitude to all those who stand for culture: “Like the rivers that embrace Baghdad, the flow of culture endures: it is in our blood to have ink in our hands.

There will always be someone inspired to communicate through words and images.

There will always be someone drawing sustenance from art and knowledge.”

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Ink and Blood Portfolio: 8.25 x 5.5 x 1�

Extension of the four books as accordion books vary from: 36 to 56�

Text pages: Hahnemuhle German Etching Paper Map pages: Niyodo Natural paper by Hiromi Portfolio and book covers: textured and painted tyvek Arabic font: B Fantezy, English font: Koufiya, 2012

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Marie Dern & Danielle Giudici Wallis San Francisco Bay Area and

Marie C. Dern was born and raised in Salt Lake City. She attended the University of California, Berkeley and received a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After graduation she followed a course of study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Marie returned to school in the 1980s and received a Master of Arts degree in Book Arts from Mills College in 1986.

In 1974 Marie began Jungle Garden Press in Berkeley in the basement of a house surrounded by a wild garden. She has since printed and published more than 40 books, including her own writing as well as others. She also makes sculptural books, one of a kind and small editions. Her books are printed letterpress and are bound by hand with attention to combining structure and content of the book to illuminate the meaning of the text. The subjects are most often humorous and ironic.

Books from Jungle Garden Press are found in many collections including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Mills College Library and the New York Public Library.

Danielle Giudici Wallis received her MFA from Stanford University where she was the recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Grant, the James Borelli Fellowship in Art, the Anita Squires Memorial Fund in Photography and a fellowship from the Iris and B.Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts.

Her work has been exhibited widely in the Bay Area and beyond including shows at Catharine Clark Gallery, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, The Bedford Gallery, Raid Projects in Los Angeles, The San Jose Museum of Art and The California Palace of the Legion of Honor which holds one of her artist’s books in their Achenbach collection.

In 2007 she was nominated for SFMOMA’s SECA Award and chosen to participate in Takashi Murakami’s GEISAI Miami.

Softboiled Happiness 10 prints made from handmade paper from invasive plants species in Redlands, California, boxed, 5 x 5”, 2013

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Jessica Drenk South Carolina

Jessica Drenk was raised in Montana, where she developed an appreciation for the natural world that remains an important inspiration to her artwork today. Tactile and textural, her sculptures highlight the chaos and beauty that can be found in simple materials.

Drenk’s work is also influenced by systems of information and the impulse to develop an encyclopedic understanding of the world.

In 2009, Drenk received an Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, funding the installation of Archaeologica at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona.

In 2006, she was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Her work has been pictured in Sculpture, Interior Design, and Curve magazines and seen in shows at the International Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, the Albuquerque Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the International Book Fair of Contemporary Creative Books in Marseilles, France, as well as galleries and art fairs across the United States.

Cirrosa 2 books, glue, wax, 41 x 54 x 2”, 2012

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Jessica Drenk has an MFA from the University of Arizona, graduated Cum Laude from Pomona College, and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.

Jessica currently recently moved to Titus, Florida.

Alisa Golden San Francisco Bay Area

Alisa Golden works with the book as an expressive art form.

She explores layered painting, printmaking, and boxmaking techniques, combining them with original poetry and short stories. In addition to her work with paper, she creates books and objects with materials such as handmade felt, beeswax, glass microscope slides, and sticks. She is the owner of never mind the press.

Her books have been exhibited internationally are in the special collections of numerous universities, museums, and libraries across the country.

Alisa is the author of five instructional books: Creating Handmade Books, Unique Handmade Books, Expressive Handmade Books, and Making Handmade Books (Sterling Publishing 1998, 2001, 2005, Lark Crafts 2011), and Painted Paper (Sterling/Lark Books 2008).

Seven trees are planted in this book that references an ancient Jewish custom of planting a tree when a child is born and the more modern tradition of planting trees in memory or honor of a loved one. The hardcover book bound in midnight blue book cloth with a wraparound magnetic cover and inset cropped image. Each signature is created from a folded glassine page that opens to reveal a silhouetted, multiple-color linoleum print of a tree branch with a personal significance: Magnolia, Camphor, Silver Dollar Gum Eucalyptus, Hawthorn, Liquidambar, and Live Oak. Short creative nonfiction pieces are letterpress printed from handset type on the glassine. Colophon includes an abstract print made from the remnants of the final linoleum blocks.

Front endpaper is wood veneer paper. Also included is a narrow booklet with a fictional modern folktale and a seventh reduction print of a Russian Olive tree. Dedicated in memory of the tenth year of their absence: Ezra Budiansky (1997-2003) and Dorothy Singer Simon (1911-2003).

Tree Frankfurt paper, Cherry Paperwood (veneer) paper, glassine, book cloth, Davey board, magnets; Caslon Oldstyle 471 type 10 ½ x 5 1/2, opens to 23 ½ x 5 ½“ Edition of 24, 2013 25

Andrew Hayes Asheville, North Carolina

Andrew Hayes grew up in Tucson, Arizona and studied sculpture at Northern Arizona University. The desert landscape inspired much of his early sculptural work and allowed him to cultivate his style in fabricated steel. After leaving school, Andrew worked in the industrial welding trade.

While living in Portland, Oregon, bouncing between welding jobs and creating his own work he was invited to the EMMA collaboration. This one-week experience was liberating for Andrew and he was encouraged by his fellow collaborators to apply to the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts. During his time as a Core Fellow, Andrew was able to explore a variety of materials and technique. Surprisingly, the book became a big part of this exploration. In this work he faces the challenge of marrying the rigid qualities of metal with the delicacy of the book page. Among his teachers was artist Doug Beube, also in this exhibition.

We became aware of Andrew’s work through our friends and collectors Karl and Theresa Robinson who had seen his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon and knew we would love it. We do. Andrew Hayes will have his first one person exhibition in the gallery in February of 2014.

Abstruse (upper left) steel, book pages, brass, 14 x 3.5 x 2.5’’, 2013 Cede (lower left) steel, book pages, brass, 7.5 x 4 x 2.5’’, 2013 Slough, (right) steel, book pages, brass, 7.5 x 4 x 2.5’’, 2013

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Charles Hobson San Francisco Bay Area

Charles Hobson uses monotypes and printmaking variations to construct images for books and works on paper. He has been a faculty member of SFAI since 1990 and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery, among others. Usually following literary or historical themes, his work has covered topics as diverse as famous couples who met in Paris (Parisian Encounters) and Mark Twain’s imaginary diaries of Adam and Eve. His archive has been acquired by Stanford University.

Dégas in Rome is a fictional diary of Edgar Dégas covering a week in Rome in 1857. Dégas was then only twenty-three years old and had traveled to Italy to immerse himself in its culture and artistic traditions. The diary contains imaginary entries and drawings by Charles Hobson in which a beautiful woman escorts Dégas to the City’s masterpieces and opens his eyes to the lessons they hold.

Five independent signatures have been sewn into an 11 x 15” accordion of BFK Rives paper. Each signature has a page-edge design from an actual Dégas sketchbook. Original drawings in the style of Dégas have been made by Charles Hobson with pencil on stained or acrylic washed paper and reproduced as high resolution digital prints that have been accented with handwork in many instances.

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DĂŠgas in Rome Accordion with sewn signatures, digital prints with hand coloring and inserted cards, bound in cloth coverd boards in a cloth covered box.12 x 8.5 x 2“, 2013

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Richard Kamler San Francisco Bay Area

Richard Kamler believes that art is, and can be, a catalyst for social change and cultural transformation. He has received many grants and awards for his work, which has been exhibited nationally and internationally; among them a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an Alaskan State Arts Council/NEA grant where he spent 9 months on Baranof Island in Alaska doing “landscape installations,” a Gunk Foundation for Public Art, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Potrero Nuevo Fund. In 1996 Kamler was awarded the prestigious Adeline Kent award from the san Francisco Art Institute and in 1999 a major Arrtist fellowship from George Soros’ Open Society institute. His project, Seeing Peace: Artists Collaborate with the United Nations, was a visionary international initiative, seeking to embed the imagination, through the presence of the artist, at the table of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Richard Kamler is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco where he created and directs the Artist as Citizen program. This program, a collaborative communitybased arts program, places artists into various communities to collaboratively create community based art projects.

In response to The Table of Voices, a large sculptural installation that made an effort to create a context for communication to occur between parents of murdered children and the perpetrators, a series of unique books were create. The original installation occurred at Alcatraz, bringing together the voices of the parents of these children and their killers. from the Table of Voices: MM’s book sheet lead, gold leaf, screen printed imagery.

10” x 10”. x 3/8”. 7 pages, printed both sides.

Unique edition of 7, 2000

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Byron B. Kim San Francisco Bay Area

Byron B. Kim grew up in Hamilton, ON, a steel town just outside of Toronto. He studied architecture at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania where he received a Master in Architecture. He currently practices as an architect and as a sculptor/mixed media artist in San Francisco.

Kim’s work in sculpture and mixed media began during graduate studies in architecture with explorations of the relationship and the connection in joining various materials. These studies allowed for the development of a specialized language - a language in which the vocabulary and grammar are derived by his view of the materials and how their particular qualities define interconnectedness and/or conflict. These studies allow for a unique ‘statement’ about a particular issue or concept that is being considered told through the language of materials themselves.

Currently, his work has been focused on concepts of transformation and ‘completion’ of the weathered, decayed or grotesque. Also present is the representation of materials that are generally viewed as ordinary, sometimes undesirable to reveal in them an unexpected depth and/ or beauty. There is often the suggestion of the architectural and scaled representation, and while sometimes part of a broader design process, each piece is intended to stand on its own representing a complete thought at a particular time and place.

Self Regard (left) paper, wood, steel, 42 x 5 x 5”, 2012 Relent, (right) paper, wood, steel, 36 x 4 x 8”, 2012

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Lisa Kokin

San Francisco Bay Area

Kokin discovered a copy of Das Kapital in Yiddish among the books handed down to her by her immigrant grandfather.

Carefully enlarging, transcribing and sewing the text of various pages on found pieces of antique linen and lace, she created what appears to be a ritual cloth. Kokin says, “I began with three random pages, enlarging and reproducing them in a sewn version in my usual labor-intensive way, like a modernday scribe in a sweatshop of her own making. Although the pieces look as though they might be sacred text, they are not, at least not in the traditional sense. Some would say they are the opposite, given Marx’s thoughts about religion. For me they are a way of preserving the legacy of my ancestors and affirming the continued life of the book and of a language rescued from the brink of extinction.”

Top from left to right: Das Kapital, (page 98), thread, lace, linen, 37.5 x 21 inches, 2013 Das Kapital, (page 226), thread, lace, linen, 37.5 x 20 inches, 2013 Das Kapital, (page 368), thread, lace, linen, 37.5 x 21 inches, 2013 32

Lisa Kokin makes art with recycled materials found in flea markets, thrift stores, and recycling centers. She has worked with buttons, photographs, and books, most recently with self-help books. Kokin’s work is often a critique of the sociopolitical status quo imbued with a healthy dose of levity and a keen sensitivity to materials and process. Sewing and fiber-related works play a key role in Kokin’s work, which she attributes to growing up in a family of upholsterers.

Thread has, in her most recent body of work, become the primary material. Kokin explores irony and memory in her seemingly ephemeral pieces, allowing transiency itself to be immortalized in lasting works of art.

Lisa Kokin received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Kokin was most recently given the Dorothy Saxe Award from the Contemporary Jewish Museum. In October Kokin will present How the West Was Sewn, a solo show at the Boise Art Museum.

Kokin’s work has been featured in many books and articles including the upcoming Art Made From Books, Chronicle Press, edited by Laura Heyenga.

Das Kapital, (page 226), (detail) 33

Kumi Korf Ithaca, New York

Kumi Korf was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied architecture at Tokyo University of Fine Arts. Her MFA degree (1977) is from Cornell University, in print-making. Her earliest artists’ books were exhibited at the Center for Book Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in 1986. She had an apprenticeship at Dieu Donné Papermill in 1987, and developed her own technique creating works using kozo fiber with inclusions of printed paper, cloth, threads, and pigmented linen pulp.She received a fellowship at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in 1990. She has used intaglio printmaking to create her own visual world. Her recent artists’ bookworks include intaglio prints, letterpress, and structural inventions for bookbinding.

Korf has taught workshops on artists’ books at The Center for the Book Arts in New York, San Francisco Center for the Book, Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT, as well as at many colleges and universities.

Her works are included in many public and private collections, nationally, and internationally, including the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Library, and Getty Center Research Library.

The Alphabet of My Phobias intaglio and silkscreen on Japanese Akatosashi paper, 10 x 12 x 1” closed, 2012

Intaglio prints on Japanese paper are cut to square format and folded to form pages. They are folded in such a way that in order to read the text - verses of a song by Maia Vidal - one has to unfold, open and close again to continue reading. The words are heavy in content and exposing the hidden words replicates fear, the subject of the text. What is coming next? The text is printed by silkscreen over intaglio prints. Colors and patterns of intaglio are intentionally random. The genius of this book is that it is constructed in a way that leads the viewer to an unexpected experience.

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Gyöngy Laky San Francisco Bay Area

Gyöngy Laky’s work is visually diverse, structurally intriguing and tactilely rich. Whether in her grids, vessels, language related sculptures or abstracted architectural forms her hand-constructed work cues a combined sensory and mental experience. She explores the possibilities of form, arrangement, dimensionality, material, texture and pattern. She is fundamentally concerned with learning, remembering, thinking and understanding through the relationship between what is tangible and tactile and what is metaphorical.

Educated among artists and architects at the University of California, Berkeley, Laky borrows freely from various methods and materials associated with architecture to adroitly construct sculptural wall works and freestanding forms while pursuing an aesthetic, intellectual and social enterprise. Gyöngy Laky is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis (design and art). Her work is in museum collections in Europe and the United States, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California.

Estuary (upper) Apple, water-based ink, backer-board screws, 35 x 34 x 3.5”, 2007 Why? (lower) commercial wood, plastic soldiers, screws, paint, 48 x 26 x 7”, 2007

There is no back structure in Laky’s work to provide support. It is the architecture of the work - a fundamental dependence on the integrity of the structure that holds all the parts together to form the clean and impactful shape.

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Guy Laramée Montreal, Canada

In the course of his 30 years of practice, artist Guy Laramée has created in such varied and numerous disciplines as theater writing and directing, contemporary music composition, musical instrument design and building, singing, video, scenography, sculpture, installation, painting, and literature.

He has received more than 30 arts grants and was awarded the Canada Council’s Joseph S. Stauffer award for musical composition. His work has been presented in United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Latin America.

Since 1986, he has authored several works. He has written the scripts and directed the following short films. He was the artistic director of PluraMuses, a company devoted to producing multi-disciplinary works and was also involved in the Meduse cooperative in Quebec City. He initiated and coordinated « L’espace traversé », a pan-Canadian conference on interdisciplinary art practices 36

Parallel to his artistic practice, he has pursued investigation in the field of anthropology. His fieldwork includes ethnomusicography of the Fetish ritual in Togo (1986), oracular imagination among healers in the Peruvian Amazon (199395), and concepts of creativity and imagination among contemporary artists (M.A. thesis, 2002). Ethnographic imagination is a characteristic in his artistic work.

Laramée’s carved books are his metaphor for the degradation of human culture. The artist’s treatment of non-fiction information stems from his idea that knowledge is gained by erosion instead of accumulation. “I carve landscapes out of books. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply is.”

Although Laramée has been involved in the arts for over 30 years with music, performance and video, his sculptures have lately come to be the most important endeavor of his artistic career. Since 2004, Laramée has had 15 solo exhibitions in both the United States and Canada. In 2009 the artist participated in “Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming Books,” held at the Bellevue Art Museum.

Moon on Han Shan is the first piece of the Han Shan project. Han Shan was a wanderer poet in 7th century China, Taoist most probably, who wrote poems on trees, rocks and walls. His poems were collected by villagers. They celebrate a life of leaving all attachments behind. Many of his poem use the moon as a metaphor of enlightenment.

Grotta is the second piece of the “A Caverna” inspired by a novel by Saramago. Saramago’s novel is itself an extension of Plato’s allegory of the cave. I often think about the paradox of creating art in those terms - are we seduced by our own shadows on the wall, or are we turning our head to see the light ?

Moon on Han Shan (upper left, first & second) altered book, inks, pigments, velum, oxidized silver leaf, wood, paint, wax, graphite, integrated lighting, 14 x 11 x 5”, 2012 Grotta (upper left, third and right) Altered book, pigments, lamp, 11 x7 x 7.25”, 2012

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Jacqueline Rush Lee Kaneohe, Hawaii

Jacqueline Rush Lee is an Anglo-Irish sculptor from Northern Ireland who lives and works in Hawaii (USA). She has been working with books for fifteen years and is recognized for working with the book form. Her artworks are featured in blogs, magazines, books and international press. Selected bibliography include: BOOK ART: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books; PAPERCRAFT: Design and Art with Paper and PLAYING WITH BOOKS: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Re-Imagining the Book. Jacqueline’s work will also be featured in ART MADE FROM BOOKS, Chronicle Press, 2013 by Laura Heyenga. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Ceramics and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Hawaii at Manoa 2000. She exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections, including the Allan Chasanoff Book Under Pressure Collection, NY. Unfurled (upper left) reformulated book, 6 x 6.5 x 6”, 2008

Nee (center left) reformulated book, 6 x 6.5 x 6” transformed Chairman Mao text, 2008

The Book of R’s (borrom left) manipulated book components, 15.5 x 15.5 x 11.5”, 2008

Anthologia

(right) manipulated Asian Literary Book Components, reassembled, inked, folded, sanded, burnished book, 9 x9 x 6”, 2008

Jacqueline Rush Lee’s work focuses on the book as object, medium and archetypal form. Working to reveal or transform the nature of a book, she is interested in the aesthetic of books as cultural objects that come with their own histories of use and meaning. By using books as her canvas or building block, Lee transforms their formal and conceptual arrangement through a variety of practices in which the physicality, and thus the context of the books have been altered. She is interested in creating evocative works that are cerebral with emotional depth.

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Claudia Marseille San Francisco Bay Area

The intelligent and richly layered paintings of Claudia Marseille convey her deep respect for time and materials.

They have an unmistakable presence, like an ancient wall, rich in history. She will patiently apply as many as 20 layers of glazes or encaustics to give the painting history and depth and then begin excavating and building. Her concerns as an artist center around color and texture. The viewer is able to experience both the complexity and the enjoyment of the process. What is remarkable about Marseille is that she is able to maintain a consistent aesthetic and quality in the work while managing to evolve and change with every new painting.

Marseille’s interests in time and complexity go way back.

She has a master’s degree in archaeology from the London Institute of Archaeology and once made her living in that field. A painting class that she took many years ago changed her course and she went back to school studying both with individual teachers and taking classes at the California College of Arts (then the CCAC). She went on to earn her masters degree in Fine Art from John F. Kennedy University. While all this was going on, she also distinguished herself as a fine photographer, which no doubt continues to inform and refine her capacity to “see” the complexity of everything around her.

Navigation refers to early explorations and travels, involving maps, ships, compasses and other means of orientation.

There are 7 “manuscript” pages on a steel stand with a patinaed copper back.

Using encaustic on paper with antique maps, phototransfers of old papers and patterns and drawing, Marseille has managed to capture a sense of time travel, where the sense age and history creates a patina of time on these beautiful “manuscript” pages.

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Navigation pages 1, 3, 6 (left) and 7(right) mixed media encaustic with steel stand and copper back 11 x 22 ½ x 4�, 2013

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Mary V. Marsh San Francisco Bay Area

Mary V. Marsh lives in Oakland, and has been making art and working in libraries in the Bay Area since 1982. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. She has exhibited in many venues in the Bay Area with solo shows at, San Francisco Art Commission at Grove Street, San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Center and San Francisco Public Library, Skylight Gallery. She makes unique and small edition artist books under Quite Contrary Press.Marsh has been in nearly every one of our yearly Art of the Book Shows, adding so much with her wonderfully crafted linocuts and keen observations of daily life.

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She says of her work, “Thinking about everyday activities, the quotidian moments, I record the patterns that make up my life. Drawing people and scenes on my daily routine, I integrate these with journal entries and artifacts collected from my work and life.”

News Delivery Systems : a Condensed History letterpress type, rubber stamp on Arches 88, 4 ¼ x 3 5/8 x 1”, 2013

Judy O’Shea San Francisco Bay Area

Judy O’Shea has been creating sculpture and installation art for over fifteen years. She has shown primarily in France where she organized an artists in residence program to collaborate and work with French and American artists. Her recurring themes often depict the transitions of life: young to old, soft to hard, student to expert. She often uses kozo (mulberry) fibers, which she prepares and makes herself in her outdoor studio near Inverness, California Poet Boats kozo fibers, fishing tackle, 72 x 34 x 10”, 2013

The poem was written by Judy O’Shea and printed on a stack of kozo fiber boats. The artist recently created an installation in San Francisco at Canessa Gallery with a similar work. We were intrigued by the delivery of a poem, on paper, that is metered, not just by pages, but by distance and space written on a vessel that might be, in itself, a metaphor - beautiful transmission of text .

Artist Statement A poem has a rhythm, and even free verse has a cadence usually delineated by punctuation or line breaks.

Poet Boats invites the reader to move from side to side to find the meter of the poem. Each line stands on its own, and can be read top to bottom or the reverse for surprising differences in meaning. e boats can even be rearranged in their racks for a different interpretation.

A working boat is always at anchor, or turned upside down, stored on its gunwales, often stacked with other boats of its class. But a boat, right side up, floating away with no tether, evokes an ethereal sense of freedom. And boats, floating with words, echoes of notes in a bottle, invite the reader to imagine their own narrative.

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Michael O’Shea San Francisco Bay Area

Michael O’Shea obtained his MFA in 1993 in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute.

He has made a number of artist books, the latest, being WALK. Michael is also a painter, printmaker and photographer. For ten years in France, he worked in collaboration with painter and ceramicist, Jean-Michel Pret, on projects involving sculptures of printed ceramics. The last project incorporated ceramic sculpture in wood stelae. For over 20 years he has worked in large format photography using alternative non-silver printing techniques.

WALK was written and hand assembled by Michael O’Shea. Each book contains ten haiku paired with hand printed etchings. The text was letterpress printed by Reb Press of Oakland, CA. The paper is Rives Moulin du Gai. It is accordion-folded so that it can be posed open and expanded. The fabric cover contains a profile cutout. It comes with a slip case covered in hand made paper by Judy O’Shea. The edition is limited to 25 copies.

Walk letterpress type, rubber stamp on Arches 88, 4 ¼ x 3 5/8 x 1” 2013

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Nora Pauwels & JohnDeMerritt San Francisco Bay Area

Nora Pauwels has been a printmaker since 1978, focusing primarily on etching. Past exhibitions featuring her work include Interplay at Kala Institute in Berkeley (2008), Cultivating Creativity at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2007), Radical Printmaking at the Art Commission Gallery in San Francisco (2000), Flight 2000 at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois (2000), and Tallin Print Triennial, in Tallin, Estonia (1998). Her work is also included in the Frans Mazereel Grafiek Collection in Belgium, the Achenbach Collection in San Francisco, and the New York Public Library. Born in Belgium, Nora lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004 she began drawing exclusively and has only recently returned to printmaking, which she now aims to infuse with the immediacy of drawing.

John DeMerritt has been a professional bookbinder since 1986. In 1995, he opened his own bookbinding shop and is well known for his ability to brainstorm with artists on special projects and create new solutions. John and Nora have done book projects together before and are planning their own publishing operation.

Grey Area is a portfolio of 10 Plexi Gravure etchings. Each etching is a botanical image derived from original Herbarium specimens created by artists’ mother in 1948. The silver leather clamshell box is a perfect compliment to the beautiful and subtle gravure etchings.

Grey Area Plexi-Gravure Etchings, Foil Stamping, embossing, letterpress and hand work.

Housed in custom clamshell box with silver leather, 12 x 15.5 x 1.5�, 2013

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Maria Porges San Francisco Bay Area

Maria Porges is an artist and writer. She is represented by John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. She received a SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has twice been in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. For over two decades, Porges’ critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, the New York Times Book Review, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. She has also authored essays for more than 60 exhibition catalogues and dozens of scripts for museum audio tours.

Book Toys, Tools, and Weapons - Maria Porges In the 21st century, our relationship to information (represented here in its traditional symbolic form, the book) is evolving quickly. I began making this series of sculptures reflecting on books/knowledge and my own multivalent relationship with such things over two decades ago; after a long hiatus, I have returned to this kind of work with a sense of both melancholy and urgency. These manipulable, labor-intensive pieces are meant to invoke the hands-on nature of learning, no matter how cerebral, as well as the sheer pleasure involved-- whether constructive or combative—in the experience. Knowledge itself has been described as a tool, a weapon or a source of enjoyment (“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”; “Knowledge is power,” or even “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.“) But what will books be to us in another fifty years? It is hard for me to imagine a time when their significance will be completely eclipsed by digital media, but the actual volumes I use for these pieces are discards, on their way to becoming landfill, rescued at their penultimate moment to become—something else.

It is my fondest wish that, armed with these relics of a pre-computer age, we can go forward into the virtual future without forgetting the past.

Bookweapon, Redtip, 2013

red scythe shaped book on long axe handle, 30 x 16 x 4”

Booktool, Tuesday Blade, 2013

book parts with hatchet handle, 20 x 5 x 4”

Booktool, Peach Hatchet, 2013

book parts with hatchet handle, 20 x 7 x 3”

Booktoy, I’m a Little Teapot, 2013 book parts with saw handle, 16 x 13x 3”

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Felicia Rice Santa Cruz, CA

Felicia Rice is the owner of Moving Parts Press. She collaborates with visual artists, performing artists and writers to create book structures in which word and image meet and merge. She employs traditional typography and bookmaking methods in conjunction with digital technology, bringing the flexibility of screen-based design to the texture and history of the letterpress-printed page.

Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions and collections both nationally and internationally, from AIGA Annual Book Shows in New York and Frankfurt to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Moving Parts Press has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including The Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Elliston Book Award, Stiftung Buchkunst Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt Ehrendiplom, and grants from the NEA, CAC and the French Ministry of Culture.

An Excerpt from Five Hymns to Pain is dedicated to the literary and intellectual community of al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad. The poem was written by one of the most influential contemporary Iraqi female poets, Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007), and translated by Husain Haddawy.

The presentation of this fierce and moving poem as a scroll grew out of my desire to print the entire book on one side of a single sheet. As the project developed, the choice of paper (Japanese Hosho) led to another, the choice of typeface (Garamond italic), and finally to the color palette (dun colors accented with red) and image creation (printed and laid down by hand with a brayer). A desert landscape emerged, sliced at regular intervals by sharp black vegetation. On Monday the book was to be in an accordion-fold format, but by Friday it became clear to us that the piece was a facsimile of a papyrus scroll.

An Excerpt from Five Hymns to Pain Letterpress and relief printmaking, 8 x 44.75”, 2013 47

Isaac G. Salazar Artesia, New Mexico

Isaac G. Salazar is an American book artist located in Artesia, NM. He has perfected a technique of folding pages to create text that relates to the original content of the book.

His work is included in MERGE: Art + Craft + Design, PAPERCRAFT 2 and CRAZY ART.

Believe is folded into a book entitled Heaven and Hell. Eclipse is folded into the book by the same title from the Twilight Saga.

Believe altered book, 7 x 6 x 9½”, 2012

Eclipse altered book, 8 x 5 x 8½”, 2012

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Erin K. Schmidt Rochester HIlls, MIchigan

This is the third book in our exhibition this year that comes out of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Project. We first saw it at the extraordinary exhibition of these works held at the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Tea and Water Pipe die cut velum, inkjet printing on 250gsm Rives BFK, book cloth, leather 5 ¼ x 3 ¾ x ½” closed , 2012

The book tea and water pipe was created in response to the senseless bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad.

Schmidt became overwhelmed with sadness for those who have lost friends and loved ones as a result of such a horrific event. In her words, “Lives are permanently changed. It is an unimaginable grief.”

Two layers of paper are bound together in concertina to create small architectural spaces that are visible through die cut lattice windows. A fictional character resides in this space, within the text. Each page of the concertina contains one brief thought about the weekly ritual of tea and water pipe, a celebration of friendship. The book is a lament for a departed friend. The repetition in text begins with two friends sharing tea and water pipe, and ends with one friend alone, in mourning, carrying on the weekly ritual that he and his friend once cherished.

The back side of the concertina contains randomly selected pages of poetry by Al-Mutanabbi, the namesake of the bombed booksellers’ street. Like the rebuilt Al-Mutanabbi Street, these fragments of poetry have been reconstructed to create something new, but there will always be a larger part that is missing.

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Paolo Salvagione San Francisco Bay Area

Paolo Salvagione is an artist who works at the intersection of engineering, participation and levity.

He was born in Chicago and at an early age moved with his family to Southern France, where he developed an affection for bullfighting. He spent his teen years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, living around the corner from Joel-Peter Witkin, whom he occasionally assisted with set construction and corpse transportation. He spent his college years in Manhattan reading philosophy.

Grounded in the practice of thinking about thinking about things, he spent a half a decade circling the world setting up bicycle factories from Italy to Indonesia — mastering titanium fabrication after hours at Martin Marietta in Colorado, working on next-generation paint-application systems for Boeing, employing CAD software for hi-tech bike design in Marin, even designing an atmospheric-dust collection tool for NASA. And he has worked, for over a decade, as lead engineer on the 10000 Year Clock of the Long Now Foundation.

Paolo Salvagione has created a sensory Wunderkammer. His elegant cabinet of curiosities contains five drawers, one for each of the human senses. Each drawer holds a distinct, self-contained object — and in the playful manner that routinely characterizes Salvagione’s work, the senses mingle in unexpected ways.

Three-dimensional projections emphasize the tactile nature of printed images. Silhouettes of leaves ask you to gauge species by contour, yet the absence of color brings attention to the visual. Talking tapes acknowledge a tangible aspect of sound. A musky, smell-based exploration summons up mental images of physical activity. A unique taste enhancer promises to temporarily bond to your receptors, making all things sour seem sweet — but first your fingers must negotiate the brittle blister pack.

And all, in combination and individually, show how our senses can deceive us, and in the process yield something akin to a child’s surprise at the roles these senses play in helping us navigate the world.

One for Each is a compact set of drawers, a box of English buckram and black leather, nearly 250 cubic inches of sensory activity. Salvagione has enlisted Boon Design to oversee typography, and Marc Weidenbaum to develop a series of short interlocking essays.

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One for Each leather, buckram, scent, paper, bookboard, glass, nylon, 8.5 X 6.25 X 5.25�, 2013

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Anik Vinay France

French book artist Anik Vinay has created collaborative books since 1976 at the Atelier des Grames, Giogondas, France.

The Atelier des Grames has been producing limited edition handmade books since 1968. Vinay joined the studio in 1976 and has been its principle artist for the last 10 years. She is a graduate of Ecole des Beaux Arts of Valence, France and has exhibited widely and received numerous awards throughout her career.

Vinay invites contemporary writers and poets to collaborate with her in her studio, giving their unpublished works a visual form. The text serves as inspiration for each piece and the results have been described as “theater” for the written word. Vinay’s works incorporate a variety of techniques and methods such as engraving and typography and make use of an array of materials including handmade paper, ceramics, wood, glass, plastic and metal.

We found this astonishing book at the Codex Fair this year.

It looks like (and is) a beautiful shale rock with gold showing in the cross section so magical and heavy in your hand. The text is a poem, written on black paper in white ink - a poem

by Antoine Ernaz. The poem is found “in” the rock, like a precious motherlode.

La Nuit Posee La, (The Night Placed It There), 1992, handwritten poem by Antoine Emaz bound in slate.

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Michelle Wilson San Francisco Bay Area

Michelle Wilson is a papermaker, printmaker, book and installation artist. Her works are in various collections, including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts, (Boca Raton, FL). She has been featured in exhibitions at numerous institutions, including the X Initiative in New York, the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, the 2006 International Biennial for the Artist’s Book in Alexandria, Egypt, and at the Joshibi Art Museum outside of Tokyo, Japan. Her extensive teaching experience includes Bryn Mawr College, Moore College of Art and Design, the University of the Arts, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Appel Farm Arts and Music Center, and the Kala Art Institute. Wilson has a BFA from Moore College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of the Arts. Her imprint is Rocinante Press.

Formerly a longtime resident of Philadelphia, Wilson has recently relocated to the San Francisco Bay area Through paper cutting, Chacaltaya documents the disappearance of Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier, from its size measured in 1940, to when it vanished completely due to global warming in 2009, a few years prior to the prediction of its disappearance. It stresses South America’s need for fresh water, which for many people comes only from glacial runoff during a portion of the year. The cut paper creates an emptiness in the book, echoing the void in the Andes where once there was a source of fresh water. Text is printed in Book Antigua, on a separate colophon page. Frontal text is in Spanish, with translation and description in English on the reverse. Edition of 5.

Kasha Katuwe, 2011 Handmade paper from burlap and cotton and flax, hand embroidery, inkjet printing, accordion bound.9 x 3”

Kasha Katuwe is Keresan, a Pueblo language, for “White Cliffs,” and is the indigenous name for Tent Rocks National Monument, located outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tent Rocks is a volcanic formation of tuff and pumice, shaped over the millennia by wind and weather to create a series of pyramidal shaped rocks. The memory of its colors, textures, and formations was the inspiration for this book in an edition of 5.

Chacaltaya, 2011 Handmade linen paper, linoleum block prints, hand cutting, Coptic binding, inkjet print, artist made clamshell, 9 x 7”

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THE ART OF THE BOOK, 2013 Jody Alexander Rhiannon Alpers Kim Anno Doug Beube Joy Broom Sarah Bryant Macy Chadwick Julie Chen Cathy DeForest John DeMerritt Marie Dern Jessica Drenk Alisa Golden Andrew Hayes Charles Hobson Richard Kamler Byron B. Kim Lisa Kokin Kumi Korf Gyöngy Laky Guy Laramée Jacqueline Rush Lee Claudia Marseille Mary V. Marsh Jennifer McKnight Judy O’Shea Michael O’Shea Nora Pauwells Maria Porges Felicia Rice Isaac G. Salazar Paolo Salvagione Erin K. Schmidt Anik Vinay Danielle Giudici Wallis Michelle Wilson

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