2018 smARTnews ROUNDup

Happy New Year — It’s been a minute . . . or two. 

For some reason, things have been so chaotic I missed several deadlines for posting quarterly to my blog.  So I apologize for this end of the year info dump, much of which seems like ancient history. I hope everyone can find a way to catch their breath in the new year, spend time with friends & family, concentrate on your art and/or carve out some time in a quiet place to read.

My year in review:

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EXHIBITIONS

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Disjecta Membra
Colleen Buzzard Studio
#401 Anderson Arts Building
250 N. Goodman Street, Rochester NY

Friday December 7 and January 4: 6-9 pm
Saturday December 8 and January 12, 2019: Noon - 4 pm
By appointment: Scott@ScottMcCarneyVisualBooks.com

The term disiecta membra is paraphrased from the Roman lyric poet Horace, who wrote of disiecti membra poetae, referring to the "limbs of a dismembered poet”. The passage is often taken to imply that if a line from poetry were torn apart and rearranged, the dismembered parts of the poet would still be recognizable.  In the study of literature, disjecta membra is often used to describe the piecing together of ancient fragments of an identifiable literary source. Similarly, in modern bibliophlic terms, disjecta membra refers to “scattered leaves”: pages of books that have been removed from their bindings, frequently for economic reasons (the commercial value of the sum of its parts is often more than that of the whole book).

This exhibition brings prints and artifacts together with the bound bookworks of their origin. Some of the prints were created as stand-alone pieces to represent bookworks in exhibitions where books were not able (or wanted) to be exhibited.  Others were designed to be displayed in both dynamic (book) and static (wall) states (ex. Far Horizons and INDEX wallpaper editions).

I thank Colleen Buzzard for the opportunity to exhibit these parallel practices in her studio where the private act of turning pages on a horizontal surface can be experienced in tandem with the public viewing of images on a vertical plane.

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Engaged Editions: Creative Advocacy in Print 
Booklyn, Brooklyn Army Terminal, Building B-7G
140 58th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11220
November 17, 2018 - January 11, 2019 (Extended to Mach 1, 2019)

Engaged Editions: Creative Advocacy in Print is a group exhibition of artists’ books, creative publications, and prints used to promote collaborative advocacy, foster community engagement, and address social justice issues. More info here. 

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Fast, Cheap & Easy: The Copy Art Revolution
CEPA Gallery, Buffalo NY
WNY Book Arts Center, Buffalo NY
September 14 - December 15, 2018

Fast, Cheap & Easy: The Copy Art Revolution is an international survey featuring over 100 artists from the 1960s to the present who have explored the neglected and underserved role of the copy machine as a quick, affordable, and innovative method to express their ideas and to inexpensively produce and circulate them to a larger audience. More info here.

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Ink, Press, Repeat: National Juried Printmaking and Book Art Exhibition
William Paterson University Gallery
April 2 - May 9, 2018

The exhibition, in the South Gallery of the University’s Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts, includes a variety of printmaking media such as aquatint, collagraph, cyanotype, etching, linocut, lithograph, mezzotint, photogravure, screen print, silkscreen, and woodcut. The exhibition was juried by Alexander Campos, executive director and curator at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Campos selected 51 artworks by 47 artists hailing from 21 states. There is a nice online catalogue available. More info here. 

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Text Message: Words and Letters in Contemporary Craft
Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin
January 21 - May 6, 2018

Text Message: Words and Letters in Contemporary Art includes works that use words, letters, and script to convey meaning. Tangible three-dimensional objects made of fiber, clay, polymer, paper, and metal along with two-dimensional works on paper underscore how contemporary artists recognize the power and complexity of the written word. Alphabook 3 was included, drawn from the museum's collection. RAM is very good about letting you know when your work is being displayed. More info here.

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Wendy’s Subway Reading Room
Bard Graduate Center Gallery
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
February 23  – July 8

Wendy’s Subway returns to the Bard Graduate Center for a second year to present the Reading Room, a platform to promote engagement with artists’ books, periodicals, and other publications. This year’s collection is curated by Some Other Books, a NY-based publisher of artists’ books and multiples founded by artist Kristen Mueller in 2018. Open during gallery hours, the Reading Room welcomes readers to an open, comfortable, and convivial setting in which to explore the collection of over 200 titles. More info here.

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Look, Look, Look . . . A Playful Book
Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY
July 11 - September 22, 2018

Organized by Elisabeth Lortic, independent curator and co-founder of Les Trois Ourses (Paris), this exhibition brings to the forefront ideas and concepts articulated by the early 20th century Futurist-informed artist Bruno Munari. It is a thoughtful and dynamic exploration of play, invention, movement, and color. It brings together a body of artworks which are child friendly, and, more importantly vehicles to engage children in creative learning process. Like children, artists explore alternate materials, and take them to the limit of their possibilities. More info here.

This exhibition was reviewed in Hyperallergic and featured a nice picture of Alphabook 3 and Yellow Hanging Accordian Book Structure in situ. Check it out here.

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KEITH SMITH AT HOME

Philadelphia Museum of Art
February 17 - July 8, 2018

This was the highlight of our year. A beautiful five-decade survey of Keith's work sensitively curated and installed by Amanda Bock, the Museum's Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs. More info here.

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PUBLICATIONS

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+81 Vol.82: A Life with Books issue 

Back in October, two weeks before we left for Oaxaca, I got an email out of the blue: "Hello, this is Nahoko Mori from +81 Magazine in Tokyo, Japan. I am writing to ask for an opportunity to feature your book project and have an email interview with you. +81 is a bilingual interview magazine covering creative scenes in genres such as graphic design, fashion, art, photography and music, and is distributed around the world. It's not a web magazine, it's a real magazine.
 
In the next edition themed Charm of the Paper issue (title subject to change; on sale 10th December, 2018),
we are planning to focus on the greatness of books (print media). We will present a diverse selection of books that express the potential, merits, and fun of original edited content laid out on paper and compiled into book format."

The deadline for submitting materials was the day before we left for Mexico, so I concentrated most of my time on photographing  work and compiling the information he needed.  I have not seen a paper copy yet (I think the closest place I can get one is Kinokuniya bookstore in midtown Manhattan) but from the screen grab above it looks pretty slick. You can check it out here. 

I sent Nahoko two self portraits in the studio, which he thought were "wonderful." The one they didn't use is a bit more eccentric:  

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Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the
Twenty-First Century
Booklyn, INC.

Freedom of the Presses is a textbook and a toolbox for using artists’ books and creative publications to further community engagement and social justice projects. The book aims to expand and enhance scholarship about creative book-making relevant to the diverse global community of librarians, publishers and readers. Freedom of the Presses features commentary and images from contemporary artists and scholars. More info here.

Suzy Taraba, Director of Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University, included my work in her essay, “A Queer Community of Books.” 

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T/HERE
7.5 x 11 inches, 16 pages

This is a digital facsimile that was made for hands-on-display in the Fast, Cheap & Easy show at CEPA/WNYBAC. The original was one of the first books I made as a grad student at VSW in 1981. It consisted of Haloid Xerox pages with additional rubber stamping, stenciling and color copy collage elements. I like seeing how the books change in this new form and how much still resonates. I have been reviewing my backlist of one-of-a-kind and small edition works for this Duschampian project of readymaking them in digital form. 

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SAFE
8.5 x 8.5 inches, 40 pages

From the colophon: “Part of the “Are We Ready Yet?” series inspired by the United State’s Office of Homeland Security. Composed in 2003 for “Love and/or Terror,” a Contemporary Book Art Exhibition and Symposium, University of Arizona Museum of Art. Inkjet prints bound with plastic and duct tape.”

Ugh. It’s a bit difficult going back into this work, if only for the fact that the paranoia and trauma experienced post-9/11 has doubled down in the Trump era.  Time to stop thinking.

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STOP THINKING: 10 Warning Signs of a Problem Thinker
4.25 x 7 inches, 44 pages

From the colophon: “Dedicated to creationists, climate change deniers, flat earthers, homophobes, misogynists, racists, Islamophobes, appointees of the Trump administration, and all practitioners of abstinence from thought.”

A bit of a one liner X 10, but it has its moments.  One of them was a reading I gave at the Rochester Small Press Book Fair at Visual Studies Workshop in October. Was the MAGA dunce cap too much?

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Have a good new year and thank you for clicking.

Fall 2017 News

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EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS

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Going (. . . Going . . . Gone!) Bananas In New York
Artbook @ MoMA PS1, Queens NY

     skúta picturing Jan and me in the midst of transition. Photograph by Philip Zimmermann.

Artbook hosted a closing reception for my 2016-2017 BANANACO Editon and the launch of Jan Voss's 2017-2018 Artbook Editions during this years New York Art Book Fair. I ceremoniously passed the baton of time-limited print editions to Jan, a great artist, friend and co-proprietor of Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam.  Artbook has a larger, newly designed location on the first floor of the museum featuring dedicated space for programming and a relaxed atmosphere for browsing their fantastic selection of books.
 
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43: VSW Project Space Residency report

Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester NY

I was fortunate to spend the month of April as a Project Space Resident at Visual Studies Workshop. The Project Space Program provides artists the opportunity to experiment with new work or new display strategies, and to have discussions with the community about works in-progress. I spent the time analyzing research I have gathered over the past three years about 43 students who were "disappeared" from the rural  teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Guerreo, Mexico. (A good summation of this tragedy appeared in The California Sunday Magazine  (A synopsis of the event can be found in the colophon of two books noted below.)  My time was primarily spent working towards a publication (which is logical and progressing, as you'll read below), but the physical space offered an opportunity to present my research as an installation.

The murals, stenciling and wheat-paste posters I have photographed since 2009 in Oaxaca City reflect a deep commitment to issues of fairness and social justice.  Since 2014, much of this visual protest in public spaces (as well as museum exhibitions) have addressed the missing 43 students.

I photographed a series of posters produced by Comuna Oaxaca that papered the walls of the colonial center of Oaxaca City. The city center is a tourist mecca where unofficial wheat pasting is not allowed. Most posters are torn down or painted over, re-performing the students' disappearance for the benefit of tourists.

I re-presented these posters by electronically removing the background and printing only the visual residue of the messages. My prints were wheat-pasted on the studio walls in the manner of the originals in Oaxaca city. These images are gathered in the book "NOS FALTAN 43" illustrated below.

I read everything I could find regarding the 43, but exhausted what could be found in English as the 24/7 news cycle moved on. In good faith, I took a Spanish language class at our local community college to expand my research into Spanish language media. Learning some basics of the language was helpful, but much of the vocabulary in news reporting was not taught in Spanish 101. The words I had to look up became a vocabulary of violence.  My initial idea was to produce a set of flash cards consisting of the typography dropped out of images I made in Oaxaca. I started proofing the cards on lined notebook paper which made formal sense and ultimately was a nicer idea. Stringing the prints together and hanging them in the gallery was inspired by the papel picado flags you see displayed for fiestas in Oaxaca.

The central piece in the gallery consisted of a large papel picado, originally meant to be a festive table covering, "pouring" from a gas can suspended over a pile of paper bullets. I'm always impressed with the creative reuse of plastic you see in Mexico, which is where the idea for this piece came from. It references the "official" story of the students' fate, though there is no forensic evidence to support it. I did not notice the formal relationship it has to the hanging index pieces I've made since the mid-90s until it was installed.

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POINTS of DEPARTURE: Meditations on Mapping
September 5 - 30, 2017, Mercer Gallery @ MCC; Sunken Gallery @ RIT

I was pleased to participate in two of the venues of this multi-sited exhibition curated by Colleen Buzzard and Karen Sardisco. "When we began this project we were certain that putting together visualizations across different disciplines would uncover interesting resonances. . . . From way-finding to envisioning the unknown, mappings record our thinking and compel us to take imaginative leaps. . . . Both collage and conversation, mapping at its best offers points of departure with destinations unknown." -- from the catalogue produced by the Mercer Gallery at MCC.

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NEW BOOKS / PUBLICATIONS

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NOS FALTAN 43
2017; digital printing; 6.5 x 10.25
64 pages perfect bound

[From the colophon] On 26 September 2014, students from the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, boarded buses for a trip to Mexico City to join a march commemorating the Tlateloco Massacre of 1968 in which hundreds of students lost their lives at the hands of the military and police.

On their way they passed through Iguala where the mayor's wife was holding a political event in support of her campaign to run for her husband's office. It is reported that the Mayor, in fear of the students disrupting his wife's event, dispatched his police to intercept the caravan and detain the students. Police accomplished this goal by firing on the unarmed students, killed several outright. In the confusion 43 of the students went missing and unaccounted for.
 

The official story provided by the government states the students were handed over to the Guerreos Unidos, the local drug cartel, who then killed them, burned their bodies at a dump and tossed their bagged ashes into a nearby river.

Parents were skeptical of this version of the story partially because it was based on police detainee's testimony. An international committee of experts reviewing the case determined that there was no forensic evidence to support the government’s conclusion.

This incident, though not atypical in Latin America, has become enigmatic of the corruption, violence and collusion of government and organized crime in Mexico.

The posters in this book were photographed in Oaxaca, Mexico, the state just south of Guerreo, in December, 2014. They were among myriad visual responses to the missing 43 students seen in the streets, museums and galleries of the city.

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el vocabulario del 43

2017; HP Indigo printing; 7.75 x 10.5 inches
44 loose leaves bound with rings in board covers

This book grew out of the list of words I needed to look up while researching Spanish language media. The photographs were made in Oaxaca, Mexico between 2009 and 2016. It functions like flash cards with English translation of the Spanish words on the verso.

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Searching for Myself

2017; 8 x 8 inches
28 pages saddle stitched in mylar cover

I stopped into the Cary Graphic Arts Library at RIT one afternoon and ran into David Pankow (Cary curator emeritus) who was researching an exhibition about photo gravure. He was trying to figure out the origin or provenance of a book illustration that had no attribution. Amelia Hugill-Fontanel (current Cary assistant curator) suggested he perform a "reverse Google search", something neither he nor I had heard of. David made a cell-phone picture of the mystery illustration and dragged it into the Google® search field and the magic of the internet provided him with a reasonable answer.  I wondered, "What would happen if I performed a reverse Google search with an image of myself?"  This book is the answer to that question.

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The First 100 Days

2017; HP Indigo printing; 8 x 8 inches
32 pages saddle stitched

When I renewed my membership to Franklin Furnace ("On A Mission To Make The World Safe For Avant-Garde Art") I received a small daily planner as a gift and acknowledgment of their 40th birthday (Lordy, Lordy . . . The Furnace is Forty!). I started using it as a diary to record headlines from news stories pertaining to POTUS 45. A bit cathartic, but painful all the same. I don't know if we'll ever have the distance to make this book easy, but it is what it is (Lordy, Lordy . . . ). The only short-term redeeming factor is the photo-collage on the end pages of protest signs from Rochester's Women's March.  I had this book on display at the VSW Pub Fair in October and it was like Kryptonite to Superman.

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*annotate: criticism, witticism, narcissism

summer 2017; 4 x 7 inches
28 photocopy pages saddle stitched

This local 'zine was initiated and edited by Tara Nelson, Robert F. Gross and Dan Varenka (all associates of Visual Studies Workshop) "to provide a playground for thoughtful and creative responses to art in our community." A noble act in light of the dearth of ink art receives in our local press.

I was flattered to see Tara's contribution consisted of notes she took while attending the lecture I gave at VSW at the end of my residency.

My contribution is an extension of the 43 project. I recently came upon a trove of black & white negatives of images I made in the '80s while walking around Rochester. I'm electronically wheat pasting the Oaxacan posters onto local architectural specimens that have also disappeared. The next issue's subtext: "Criticism, Eroticism, Fascism." Stay tuned.

 

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UPCOMING EVENTS

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John Cage, Variations III

Live Performance
Friday December 1, 7 pm
Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince Street, Rochester NY

In 1962, John Cage conceived a method for one or any number of people performing any actions to create unique scores using a process of indeterminancy. VSW is organizing a performance of the piece and I'm looking forward to being one of the participants. An image of my score is below. I hope if you are in the area you'll come for the experience.

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Philadelphia Museum of Art Workshop
Saturday, May 5 2018
in conjunction with Keith Smith's exhibition

Amanda Bock, the curator of Keith's career survey of books and prints (opening February 17 and on display through July 8, 2018) is programming a series of afternoon workshops in conjunction with the exhibition. She asked me to facilitate one in May, content to be determined. I believe the events will be free and open to the public (but don't quote me). If you're in the area stop by and say hello -- and don't miss this exhibition of which much thought and care has gone into the making.

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Hybrid Textual/Visual Books Workshop
Wells Book Arts Center
July 15 - 21, 2017

I've had the idea for a workshop like this for a while now, and was happy that Richard Kegler, the Director of Wells Book Art Center, liked the pitch. It grew out of an excess of blank books I have made while teaching which rarely inspire my visual bookmaking practice. So I started binding re-purposed pages from printed books while demonstrating bindings in class, which inspired a whole series of projects ("Found and Bound"; "Headless Scrapbooks"; "Collected & Bound" among others). It is an experiment in simultaneity and chance through materials and binding – How a book's format and structure can inform and, indeed, create content. We'll bind pre-printed substrates, i.e., maps, placemats, joss, proof prints, . . . anything that can be pierced except blank paper, and take it from there.

       Headless.6 (Speechless): A Scrapbook Twice Removed
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Have a good winter and thank you for clicking.