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
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
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?
Have a good new year and thank you for clicking.
