Praeterita

I've taught a lot of classes in the past two years showing people how to make different kinds of artist's books. Two of my own small handmade books recently made their way into the Joan Flasch Collection at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. For me, this all started in 2010-2011, when I embarked on an extensive project: a 100 page accordion book of lithographic prints, each page printed in up to 5 colours. Closed and stacked, the book measured 6 x 5 x 4 inches: Extended to its full length, it was about fifty feet long: To store it securely, I made a clamshell box for it: And so it sits on a shelf in my studio, occasionally unwrapped to show to visitors, waiting for the time when it can be added to another collection. It's still the best artist's book I've made.

I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that a collaborative exhibition I proposed to 1078 Gallery in Chico, California, has been accepted and scheduled for January 2014. The gallery is a huge, marvellous space in this buzzing university town in northern California, which is also home to the Janet Turner Print Museum . The gallery hosts live events as well as exhibitions (see above photos), and my proposal consisted of a combination of these things. Called Places I've Never Been , it's a reimagining of two previous projects: The Lucerne Project (my solo show from 2011), and Climbing the Crooked Trails (my joint show with Patty from 2009). To quote from my proposal document: The title Places I Have Never Been unites the common themes of these two bodies of work: imagining the lives of people in remote places; creating a narrative that is based on ‘facts’ but develops into a different, parallel, oblique form of ‘truth’; arriving at a third space somewhere b...

Below is the text of the paper I read at MIX: Transmedia Writing & Digital Creativity , a conference Patty and I attended in Corsham Court (part of Bath Spa University) in the UK. The slideshow has all the images that I projected as I spoke. The Lucerne Project: Re-Imagining Narrative Art in the Digital Realm Translation As a writer who became a visual artist who incorporates writing into exhibitions of his work, I have thought a lot in recent years about the idea of translation. When we talk about translation, the most common association of the word is with languages, of recreating the meaning of something written in Russian, say, into English, as the translators Pevear and Volokhonsky have done with the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. For my purposes, I think of the word translation in a literal way, as an act of moving something from one place to another place. And it’s a concept that has cropped up much more since I started working with imagery deriv...

Now we're in Bath Spa, the elegant Georgian city on the banks of the River Avon and the Avon canal. We're here for a conference about writing and mixed media art in the digital realm, at which I am presenting about The Lucerne Project, and at which Patty and I are running a joint workshop (together, not one where people smoke joints). But even in this museum-like city, the old and the new jostle against each other. In the hallway of the hotel, outside our room, is this Blue Plaque: And then in the main shopping street, we saw two young people doing some street-hip-hop-jazz, and very good they were at it, too: Ladies and gentlemen, once again I give you: MODERN BRITAIN!

... are featured in an article in this magazine, Fictionary, produced by the talented student faculty of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. They interviewed me and Audrey about our artist's books--and I didn't know Audrey was going to be the co-featured artist, so I am flattered to be on the same page as she. I think they didn't exactly choose the best picture of me from the reel that they shot (I look stoned or half asleep, and I can assure you I was neither). But that aside, it's a good article (click on the image to enlarge it to a readable size):

I took down the Lucerne Project show on Thursday and Friday. I took one last shot before I started dismantling the shelves: Did I ever show the front of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, where the gallery was housed? Here it is: One positive thing about the ending was that, for the first time, I was able to fold up the 100 page accordion book and put it into the clamshell box that I created for it: It fits very well. I also brought home the mailbox from the Special Event, and found that nearly all the cards had been used.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Here are some pictures from the special event for The Lucerne Project last night. A nice number of people came along to: write a message on a postcard printed especially for the event; affix an address label to the card, chosen from a list of names from the Lucerne phone book; 'mail' the card into a box installed in the studio. Many thanks to everyone who attended and who participated.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

The box wot I made for the Lucerne Project: Special Event on Friday night. When people have finished writing their card and affixing a Lucerne address to it, they can pop it into this box, and the card will later magically be sent on its way to Switzerland. Materials: cardboard, tape, ppost paper, glue. Thomas Hirschhorn, eat your heart out. And here is the card that I had printed (front and back):     Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

The Columbia Chronicle is the campus newspaper for Columbia College Chicago, where I teach part-time and where Patty is Associate Professor in Fiction Writing (and currently Acting Chair of the Fiction Writing Department). They interviewed me last week about The Lucerne Project, and the result was a very fine article about the show and my work that came out yesterday. I was especially grateful for the nice things said about me by the other people quoted -- thanks, Julia Borcherts and Deborah Doering . Click on the images to display them at a larger, more legible size:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Thank you to everyone who attended the opening night of The Lucerne Project last night. Special thanks to Glen and Deborah Doering, the gallery directors. And further thanks to the newspaper reviewer, with whom I had a stimulating conversation, and the museum gallery director, who may provide another venue to display this project.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

First of all: I've noticed that the most-read post on this blog is something I wrote last November about seeing an Anish Kapoor sculpture in London, which I coupled with a funny anecdote about said artist, told to me by a friend of mine. Which is weird, considering that most of my posts this year have been about my own work. Which brings me to this. I took photos of all the pages from the 100-page accordion book, together with eight of the texts from the imaginary Lucerne diary, and sent them to the online print-on-demand company Blurb.com, to be printed in book form. I did that last week, and the first copy arrived today. I'm extremely pleased with the result: The cover is an image that wraps around from front to back. Then inside, I arranged the images two to a page, broken up every ten pages or so by text: Copies will be on display in the gallery in October, and the book will also be available then for purchase from Blurb.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader...

Actually, this was a studio day, but I didn't go to the studio. I spent a lot of time preparing image files of the 100-page accordion book for the Lucerne Project, which I am sending to be printed using the on-demand publishing site, Blurb.com. This is so that visitors to the exhibition in October will be able to see the prints from all the pages. The real accordion book will be displayed accordion style, and so not all of the images will be visible. This means that for the the first time, all the pages of the book have been photographed and digitized with a consistent tonality, size, etc. Here is an album of all 100 pages. Page size: 6" x 4.5". BFK Rives printmaking paper, light grey. Paper-litho transfer prints of found internet images, drawings. All of the pages have between 3 and 6 prints on them.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Thinking ahead to the exhibition in October, I tried this way of arranging the accordion book. It would still require a 12-feet long table.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I'm being interviewed about The Lucerne Project for a magazine next Wednesday, and the photographer asked me to bring along the 100-page accordion book. On my last visit to the studio, I started making a clamshell case to house the book: The 'flaps' are created by scoring halfway through the bookboard, then bending them upwards (or downwards, depending on how you're looking at them, like if you were in space or something). The upper box gets reinforced with a strip of paper, then I can test how they fit together: A snug fit! Next stage: covering the boxes with a map of Lucerne. Final stage: cutting and covering the base, then gluing everything together.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

A studio drying out from a recent flood; a sore back that made it difficult to do much printmaking; flies coming through the window that I opened to let in some much needed ventilation. These were some small challenges I overcame to continue printing images onto the 100 page accordion book for the Lucerne Project:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Continuing to add fresh layers of prints to the 100 page accordion book for The Lucerne Project (the red shape on the left, and the blue shape on the right). I'm doing blind contour drawings of details from the images of Lucerne that I took from the internet; enlarging the drawings 400% on a xerox machine; then transferring them onto the book pages using the paper-litho transfer technique.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This is the first draft of an animation for the Lucerne Project show in October. Except for the painted backdrop, which is 3ft high and 6 ft wide, it may not look like this. I just wanted to try a few things out, get my hand back in, put my thoughts in order, see how it looked, before I buckle down to work on something longer.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This weekend, details about The Lucerne Project show (at Finestra Art Space , Chicago, in October) were officially added to the Chicago Artists' Month sites, and we were given the go-ahead to start using the organization's logos on marketing materials. If you look at the Lucerne Project blog, you'll see the CAM logo in the right column. I therefore spent my latest studio day taking better photos of the accordion book against a white background, and making publicity photos of it, such as the ones shown here: It feels that I'm nearly finished, and also that there's so much work left to do.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I spent hours cutting up bits of mat-board and masking tape, working out the design of a box to house the 100-page accordion book for the Lucerne Project . I'm considering this: a box that folds out flat, to reveal more prints fixed to the inside, or a continuous print like a map or something. Here are a few photos showing how it folds back together: The sides would stay closed using some tiny bits of velcro embedded into the book board.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I glued together the second half of the signatures of the 100-page accordion book. Here they are with my most excellent vintage iron pressing down on them: I have ended up with a few signatures to spare from the 100-page accordion book, so I experimented with different colours: I tried a rose-red colour, but that didn't work at all, so I used sanguine, and that worked better with the brown, silver, and blue: The first colour was a mixture of sanguine and black, so it makes sense that using one of the original component colours would harmonise more easily.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader