Bartalos

I’m pleased to be exhibiting two works in Binding Desire: Unfolding Artists Books at Otis College of Art and Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery in Los Angeles. The group show features approximately 120 works from Otis Millard Sheets Library’s Special Collection of 2,100 artists books dating from the 1960s to the present. Otis’s book arts collection is one of the largest in Southern California.

My displayed pieces are Cryo Primer 1 and Vostok. Cryo Primer 1 was produced during a Xerox PARC art residency and casts an eye on the experimental and speculative nature of human cryopreservation. Reverse-printed text pays homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s journals while suggesting that novel technologies, such as cryonics, also warrant ‘reflection’ for proper assessment. Ink-jet printed throughout, the laser-cut eight-fold structure is fashioned from a single sheet of vellum featuring pop-ups on all three spreads, and is housed in a laser-etched rubber case bound with aluminum screw posts. It was issued in an edition of 25 copies.

Cryo Primer 1 is part of a larger project titled Polar Book Lab that juxtaposes science, art and narrative in considering the broader sociological implications of cryogenics, cryobiology, and cryonics. The project derives its aesthetic sensibility from the sculptural quality inherent to scientific instrumentation and material.

Vostok was produced in collaboration with Dolphin Press in Baltimore during a visiting faculty residency at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The title refers to the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. Lake Vostok is a relatively recent discovery and research suggests that it supports active micro-organisms that evolved in isolation for several millions of years. This book speculates on those life forms, as well as those that may lie outside Earth’s atmosphere.

The text and images are letterpress and screen printed on French Dur-o-Tone cover stock and the coptic-bound signatures are cased in hinged wooden covers. The wood is a nod to Ernest Shackleton’s Aurora Australis whose covers were cut from wooden provision cases in 1908 to create the first book ever published in Antarctica.

The exhibition is on view from January 25 – March 30, 2014. Gallery information and the list of exhibiting artists can be found on the press release here.