“Book Conversations: Part 1” Exhibition

“Book Conversations: Part 1” Exhibition

LMAKgallery

This event has ended.

LMAKbooks+design presents Book Conversations, a two part curated selection of artists and collectives who give - either through language or visuals - a refreshing look at the format of a book and its narrative structure. Part 1 will open this Friday, September 14 and will be on view until the 12th of October. Part 2 will run from November 9 until December 9, both sections will feature the works by Michael Bauer, Sang-ah Choi, Dorothy Projects, Carter Hodgkin, Matthew Bede Murphy, Matthew Weinstein, and Natasha Sweeten.

Michael Bauer has worked with book formats and re-interpreting the printed matter since his teens and sourcing from this self made ‘library’ created unique two dimensional works. Layering the visuals from sketchbooks to handmade books and reapplying them either through print or drawing he’s created a memoir of his visual image bank. Bauer was born in 1973 in Erkelenz, Germany where he went to Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig studying under Walter Dahn. He currently lives and works in NYC.

Sang-ah Choi has been exploring the structure of a book as a sculptural entity as an extensive practice within her work. From panorama structures built out of ‘pop-up’ layers or accordion books with fragile elaborate paper-cuts layering inhomogeneous images originating from external (i.e. Korean/mixed) cultural backdrops, the three pop-up works reflect my personal perspectives on the contemporary consuming culture (with focus on America). Choi has shown at such institutes as the Schneider Museum of Art, Fairbanks Gallery, Potland Art Museum and Sarubia Dabang in Seoul

Dorothy Projects was recently named one of five small presses “slyly changing the industry for the better” (Flavorwire), Dorothy, a publishing project is dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women. Each fall, they publish two new books simultaneously. They work to pair books that draw upon different aesthetic traditions, because a large part of their interest in literature lies in its possibilities, its endless stylistic and formal variety. The press is named for its editor’s great-aunt Dorothy Traver, head librarian, author, gardener, animal-lover, and bookmobile-driver, who on each birthday gave her niece a book stamped with an owl bookplate.

Carter Hodgkin created the Kama Sutra Series in India at the Khoj International Workshop in 1998. Working with the traditional Asian palm leaf book and collaged elements of found publications of the Karma Sutra along with the Starr Report and ubiquitous American self-help books on relationships between men and women. It is a striking time to revisit these works in the light of the “Me Too” movement and legal definitions of sex as outlined in the Starr Report. Hodgkin wok has been shown around the world from ZKM Center for Art & Media, Gemany, Musee Dole, France and her work is permanently on view at Capital One HQ, Neiman Marcus - Beverly Hills, and Queens College.

Matthew Bede Murphy is an observer and has recorded these in to these preciously handcrafted books that narrate his encounters throughout his travels. The bound leather journals are joined by his series “Colorama” which are found books that he’s re-claimed with his drawings combining the weathered narrative of the discarded book with his interpretation. Murphy is an artists , curator and collector of eccentric images. This work encompasses handcrafted reappropriations and leather bound sketchbooks. Murphy’s work has shown across the US from Avis Frank Gallery, Texas, to 18th street art Center and the Woodbury University’s Nan Rae Gallery. He is also the co-founder of the LAND Gallery and Studio, a non-for-profit Day Habilitation program for developmentally disabled artists.

Natasha Sweeten has been building off her visual books since 1993 and they have become an integral part of her practice. During this exhibit the viewer has the possibility to browse through these visual narratives and follow the changes over the years. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA) and Bard College (MFA), Sweeten has exhibited at various spaces such as the Edward Thorp Gallery (NYC), Zg Gallery (Chicago) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. She has held artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a 2006 recipient of an artist fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Matthew Weinstein’s grids of obsolete library catalogue cards, which he began collecting on eBAY as a tribute to the libraries of his past, are inked and stamped, layering his own marks over those of the librarian. They are personalized with his signature imagery of fish, skeletons, painterly gestures and plant life. Like Slipstream fiction, Weinstein links ideas and images that have no apparent connections into narratives that accumulate meaning, but fall short of conclusion. Rife with rhymes and false equivalencies, these pieces create a symbolic and narrative poetry based on the condensations and lost indexical locations of books. For the artist, picking the cards out of a pile and seeing which ones relate to other ones also constitutes a primitive model of the pastime of the non directional internet search. Weinstein initially showed these works at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in 2013 and in the exhibition “Jew York” at Zach Feuer.

Media

• Prints

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