Collection Spotlight: Robbin Ami Silverberg's "All About Women"

Our exhibition Multiple, Limited, Unique, on view at the Center until September 10, includes the work All About Women, created by Robbin Ami Silverberg. This book is a pamphlet concertina and number 7 in an edition of 20. The papers used are handmade and painted, varying in color, weight, and composition from leaf to leaf. The text was printed using an archival inkjet printer.

  

Silverberg tackles anti-woman rhetoric on a global scale, collecting derogatory proverbs into four categories- death, sex, knowledge, and good/evil.  Although she has chosen to print some of the text in upper and some in lower case, the delivery is uniform across the page and clustered in patterns through clever use of repetition. 

  

Silverberg is concerned with the traditional perception of how the work and existence of women is equivocated to worth, and the common thread of oppression as expressed across the continents. One of Silverberg’s other works, a very literal piece titled Proverbial Threads, riffs on this idea through the formation of bobbins. In All About Women, however, Silverberg examines the proverbs by printing them onto crafted paper, binding them in concertina fashion to provide flexibility for the viewer’s inspection.

On Robbin Ami Silverberg’s website, she writes that her work “conceptually focuses on word cognition and interlinearity, with an emphasis on process and paper as activated substrate.”  Examining the paper, one can see that the darkly colored balance of painted shapes performs a somber delivery. Blacks and dark blues make up a majority of the paper’s coloring.  Paired with the proverbs, this book is a meditation on paper’s influence on the impact of letters and message delivery.

With this book, Silverberg demonstrates the mastery of her craft alongside words like “The women’s side of the house. The side without knowledge.” Silverberg exposes the preposterous nature of gender expectations and exploitation, while also reflecting on the word’s ability to restrict and govern human behavior.

To view this work, please come to The Center for Book Arts before September 10th and see it in our exhibition: “Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection of The Center for Book Arts.”

To read more about this work, please click here.
-------------------
-Rebecca Kish

Renovations at the Center for Book Arts

A series of exciting renovations are taking place at the Center for Book Arts! Being addressed first: A new HVAC system, which is a much needed update for the Center. It will address the issues of climate control, air quality and noise.

One of our new units being hoisted into place.

The installation of the new HVAC system will ultimately make the Center for Book Arts a safer and more comfortable place to print, bind, take classes, and peruse our galleries. 
 

Draped printing equipment and the installation of ducts. 

The Center for Book Arts may have to periodically close its doors to the public, and we appreciate your patience during this time. We'll keep you updated as to emergency closings, as well as the status of our galleries. Work will take place during the day, so evening and weekend classes will not be affected. We still have a small amount of studio space, but its best if you call us ahead of time. Artist talks will go on as planned.

A population of ducts being stored in the second bindery!

While the HVAC is being installed, The Un(framed) Photograph has been temporarily taken down, in order to protect the works of art.  The exhibition will be on display in its entirety for the artist talk on the evening of July 27.  The exhibition will be open to the public by the end of next week at the latest, and hopefully much sooner.  Multiple, Limited, Unique remains on display.  Visitors to this exhibition are encouraged to visit on Saturday, when no construction will be taking place.  

 Carefully draped front gallery space.

The new HVAC system will enable us to better control the gallery climate, helping to protect the works of art.  The second phase of the Center’s renovations, set to take place next year, will involve the construction of new gallery walls and doors, the creation of a separate collections storage/reading room, a renovated foyer and bathrooms, and the installation of new lighting throughout the space.  

The third and last phase of renovations (to take place in 2013) will be to construct and install new storage units throughout the Center. Shelving units with custom doors and access features built specifically to accommodate the Center’s specialized tools and equipment will benefit our artists and students.

 
All of these renovations will are helping to make our space a safer, more comfortable place to view, create, and store works of art.  Thank you so much for your patience as we renovate our space, and we will keep you updated as much as possible. 

First Impressions - The Un(framed) Photograph: Artist Members Annual Exhibition

Thalia Husain is a volunteer at the Center for Book Arts.  Here, she shares her impressions of one of our current exhibitions, The Un(framed) Photograph. 

The Un(framed) Photograph, one of the current exhibitions on display at the Center for Book Arts, focuses on how the art of photography, the photographic process, and related media such as video stills are used to convey content, form, text, and image with a broader context of book and related arts. Featuring current members of the Center’s artistic community and other invited artists, the exhibit includes a variety of media including books, sculptures, mixed media installations, new media, and performance art.

I enjoyed the exhibit and was surprised by the continuity of the pieces given the range of media utilized.  Even while including video installations and audio pieces, the collection was united by a sense of form and text that one associates with traditional book arts. However, the addition of photographic elements added a sense of visual poetry and movement to each piece and gave dynamism to the exhibition as a whole. One of my favorite pieces was “Cloud Book Study” by Heidi Neilson.  The piece consisted of a book and a short video, and the video shows the book being paged through at high speed. The high speed reveals a time-lapse film of clouds across the pages of the book, in which each page spread is a single frame of the film. The film shows the movement of the clouds across the sky in a way you couldn’t achieve by thumbing the book on your own. (see picture below)

I also found the themes of social commentary, landscape and urbanism, and pop culture running through the show to be both relevant and interesting. Among these, I thought “Farewell My Homeland”, a book of photographs printed on silk, powerfully portrayed the fear, hope, and despair experienced by people forced to leave their homeland.  For me, the message was solidified through the contrast of the dark imagery with the lightness of the silk medium.  Another one of my favorite pieces was “DUMBO Comic” by Paul Clay, which explored the history of Brooklyn's DUMBO district  in comic book form.  Using a familiar and inviting storytelling method, the artist provides a unique commentary on urban planning, quality of life, and the visual impact of the street level built environment. (see picture below)

Overall, I found “The Un(framed) Photograph" to be both thought provoking and beautiful. I really enjoyed the interactive side of the exhibit, and would encourage everyone to come and see it for themselves!

The Handwritten Text

Coming up next week:
Embarrassed by your handwriting, but like the look of a hand-written text? Want to use handwriting to create a one-of-a-kind book, but would rather use someone else's? Join us next Saturday, July 23 for The Handwritten Text, a one-day intensive designed to shake up your handwriting. Under the expert tutelage of Karen Gorst, students will experiment with different pens and speeds of writing, learning about the tone and voice of their writing. Karen will encourage all to think about the rhythm of what you write, and about the form of each letter. By the end of this workshop, you'll have a new relationship with your handwriting and learn to develop writing that is fit for a manuscript!

Karen Gorst is a calligrapher, manuscript illuminator and book artist who has been practicing her craft for more than 20 years. A co-founder of the Gabriel Guild, she is a visiting instructor and lecturer at many institutions, including the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Penland School of Crafts, the Craft Students League, the Cloisters and Wellesley College.
You can find complete registration details here. 

Expand your printing vocabulary: Do It Yourself Polymer Plates

Van Lier Learning Series Part Two: 

Do It Yourself Polymer Plates                     
                   

In 2010-11 the Center awarded three year-long scholarships to Kimberly McClure, Sarah McDermott, and Benjamin Reynaert as part of the Edward and Sally Van Lier Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts, funded by the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fund. This program is intended to support individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to the artistic endeavors in the book arts, and to provide opportunities to emerging artists committed to developing careers in the book arts field. This summer we’re offering a series of three workshops with our scholars-in-residence. Students may sign up for the entire series or just for one class, each taking place on a Saturday during the months of July and August.

The second installment of this series, Do It Yourself Polymer Plates is coming up the end of this month, with Sarah McDermott. Sarah's workshop is designed to expand your options for image-making on the letterpress, and to skirt the time delay and expense often involved in sending away for polymer plates. Over the course of a fun and full day we will make polymer plates from scratched negatives, rubylith cut-outs, and solar exposure methods, without sending away for negatives or plate making. These techniques result in a variety of line qualities and textures that can be used for both images and hand-lettering. We will experiment with combining techniques as we go through the steps of preparing negatives, exposing the plates (via both an exposure unit and the sun), washing them out by hand, and then printing them.  

Previous letterpress experience is recommended.

Coming up on July 30, Saturday, 10 am to 4pm
With Sarah McDermott

Complete registration details are here.

Collection Spotlight: Recovery: The Hospital Drawings of Alfonso Ossorio

One of the larger works in our collection is a book called Recovery filled with matted drawings by the artist Alfonso Ossorio. Created in 1995, this compilation of drawings represents the body of work created as Ossorio pushed through his illness.

Each of his drawings is mounted and matted on Stonehenge and stamped with contiguous numbers coinciding with their appearance in the book. The drawings all contain twisting and weaving colors of cyan, orange, or magenta and hold the viewer to a mostly subconscious thread of continuity, a base level of mood. This is perhaps what makes the absence of these colors so noticeable towards the end of the illustrated series.

[click to enlarge]

Recovery represents the combined efforts of many people. The book itself was designed impeccably by The Center for Book Arts founder Richard Minsky and contains a lovingly historical and analytic purview of Ossorio’s life and artistic processes by Dr. Lewis Thomas. Praise of his legacy as an artist, benefactor, collector, and friend is stated at the very back of the book. Throughout the pages, writing and collaborative efforts are documented silently without affixed names, but on the very last page are the signatures of all of the contributors. (Collaborators include: Rose Slivka, Lewis Thomas, B H Friedman, and Richard Minsky (CBA).

Recovery is an excellent example of the book as a vessel for visual expression.  The superb matte job of each print lends a clean scope to the brightly colored and intensely non-linear works they contain.  From the perspective of recovery, each drawing either overwhelms the viewer with an overload of a mind in a crisis or the sparse lines of absolute conviction within expression. There is an undeniable parallel between the book as a vessel and Ossorio’s famous work in the medium of assemblage. The idea of making a statement by balancing visual components is part of all artistic media. The book is one that remains true to the idea of preserving this balance to continually inspire.

Read the colophon and find out more about this work: here.

Read an interview with Alfonso Ossorio: here.
Don't forget to attend the opening of Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Center for Book Arts: Wednesday, July 6, 7 - 9 pm!

---

Rebecca Kish

Collection Spotlight: Heidi Neilson and Chris Petrone’s “Uniform Paper”

Soon to be on display in our show, Multiple, Limited, Unique is the piece Uniform Paper, created by Heidi Neilson and Chris Petrone. Many of our recent spotlights have discussed the interdisciplinary aspects of book making, but hardly touched upon the art and versatility of paper making. With this piece, Neilson and Petrone show us how we can take a common visual vocabulary and transform it into another physical vocabulary.

Uniforms sourced from the artists' personal collection, as well as sites like Ebay, were dissembled into their most basic fibers and reconstituted into leaves of paper to be bound. The artists’ idea of what we consider a uniform transcends the traditional scope of the military and working professional.  Here we encounter diapers, prison jumpsuits, a wedding dress, a brownie jumper, and ballet costume. When breaking down the various materials of these uniforms, the separation of fibers and fabrics becomes more striking.  When re-condensed into a paper form, the uniform colorways are destroyed and a new composition is struck.

 [please click to enlarge for a better understanding of composition and texture]

The materials that are not made of 100% cotton are of note because of the unpredictable nature of their resettling. The school uniform is a perfect example of this: the fibers retain their integrity concerning color, but leave us to imagine their origin. School uniforms also vary from school to school, utilizing many different simple styles and marks of differentiation. These have more independent agency than something like a prison uniform, which utilizes a jumpsuit fit and a common traffic cone orange to express the purpose of simplicity. The leaf of paper made from the jumpsuit retains its striking color, but unlike the school uniform, settles without much reconfiguration.

Also interesting is the artists’ choice to use a diaper. We rarely think of a diaper as a uniform, but the diaper's inclusion in this book suggests that, like the other uniforms, it can be a form of social control and an indication of status. 

All of these uniforms are meant to label the wearers in some mode or another, but collect into one book the various stages and decisions the wearers have made. There are uniforms that signify choice in profession, various forms of government control, moral choices, and social commitment (wedding dress, school uniform, brownie jumper).

The physical act of breaking down of a uniform and making it into a surface for writing seems appropriate for each story that the fabric could potentially hold. Upon each page is letterpress printed type acknowledging what the paper is made of. The book is bound in the Coptic style, something that denotes simplicity and longevity.

To read more about this work and what each leaf is made of, click here.

-Rebecca Kish