Bookdummypress - Opening Night, NYC Thursday October 6

If you happen to be in New York next week, October 6, be sure to get along to the Bookdummypress Opening Night for the launch of Victor Sira's bookwork: BOOKDUMMIES: An Imaginary Studio, a Non-stop Process 1993 - 2015.

Bdp say this: We are thrilled to invite you to attend the opening of our new bdp pop-up store at 36 Cooper sq Project Space and our first exhibition BOOKDUMMIES: An Imaginary Studio, a Non-stop Process 1993–2015 by Victor Sira

The new bdp pop-up is located in the middle of the east village historic district in the same building as the iconic newspaper The Village Voice.

The exhibition will showcase a selection of original book dummies and prints that Sira made over the last 20 years.

36 Cooper Sq, New York, NY 10003 You will see a buzzer on the left side of 34 Cooper Sq

Please RSVP @ bdp@bookdummypress.com

Ron Jude has a new bookwork - VITREOUS CHINA

 

It's always a pleasure to see new work, new books from American photographer Ron Jude. Ron's images always surprise, always question and leave me with the response OMG I wish I'd shot that.

VITREOUS CHINA was published in September by Paris based publisher Libraryman. They say this about the book:
Ron Jude’s (b. 1965, American) Vitreous China is comprised of an archive of photographs he made while exploring areas of light industry in (primarily) Midwestern American cities. Rather than comment on the workings of industry itself, Jude depicts the ambient peripheral zones suffusing these environments: big rig parking lots, side exits, and other secondary spaces in which Jude imagines his grandfather might have daydreamed, or let his mind wander, during his many years as a kiln operator in vitreous china plants, first in the Midwest, and later in Southern California.
Supplanting the narrative inadequacies of photography with an alternate experience of atmospheric immersion, Jude exploits the seemingly factual, descriptive traits of the medium while also pursuing moments of subjective transcendence. Like the paradoxical relationship between the surface beauty of vitreous china (an enamel coating applied to porcelain) and its blunt, utilitarian function (strengthening toilets & sinks), the photographs, interwoven with a series of short texts by Mike Slack, attempt to tease out an experience that embraces both the physical crudeness of these spaces as well as the intangible complexes of memory and narrative encoded within them.

First edition of 375 copies, numbered. Special edition of 25 numbered copies, with signed archival pigment print.

16 cm x 20 cm. 54 pages. 1 fold-out. 29 color plates. Offset printed softcover. Saddle-stitched, in grey paperboard clam-shell with typography in white foil.

You can order online direct from Libraryman HERE.  And while you are at it it's worth checking out the other books in the Libraryman stable - Takashi Homma, Gerry Johansson, Viviane Sassen and more. Have a look HERE.

 

Printed Matter presents the eleventh annual NY Art Book Fair

 

Printed Matter presents the eleventh annual NY Art Book Fair, from September 16 to 18, 2016, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens. A preview will be held on the evening of Thursday, September 15.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. The 2015 fair featured over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries, and was attended by more than 35,000 people.

This year’s NY Art Book Fair will include an ever-growing variety of exhibitors – from the zinesters in (XE)ROX & PAPER + SCISSORS and the Small Press Dome representing publishing at its most innovative and affordable, to rare and antiquarian dealers offering out-of-print books and ephemera fromart and artist book history, plus the NYABF-classic Friendly Fire, focused on the intersections of art and activism.

NYABF16 will also host an array of programming and special events: now in its eighth year, The Classroom is a curated engagement of informal conversations, workshops, readings, and other artist-led interventions. The Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference (CABC), in its eighth year, will feature two full days on emerging practices and issues within art-book culture.

MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue on 46th Avenue, Long Island City, NY

FUNDRAISING EDITIONS
Printed Matter presented new limited-edition artworks by contemporary artists – artists to be announced soon! Purchase of these editions support the Fair, helping to ensure that the event remains free.

NEW BOOKWORK for 2017 - what's it called?

Below are a series of spreads (not all) from my new bookwork due for publication in 2017. I've blanked out the title because I don't want to reveal that just yet.
I thought it might be interesting to ask readers of this blog to email me with a title that comes to their mind.

For the title that I think works best I will send its creator a signed print of the books cover image.

I'm not doing this to canvas for a title that I can use because the title I've come up with works really well. Given that I support the idea that the viewer / reader is ultimately the author, it will be fascinating to see what people think and can dream up. The book is black, strange and mysterious.

You can email me at harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz. Please put - book title - in the subject line.
 

 

Photographers whose work I like - No32/ Linn Phyllis Seeger

  

I met Linn Seeger several years ago through my Cologne friends Tina Schelhorn and Wolfgang Zurborn. Linn came to one or other of my Cologne workshops and we often run into each other at Paris Photo or Photo London. What's more Linn has been a willing subject for images I've made and used in several of my bookworks.
I've been watching Linn's work over the last years and am impressed with the acuity of her vision, making simple but loaded pictures, proof of the world's strangeness.
Linn's tumblr site is short on words, but she does say this about herself: Based in Cologne, Germany. 2010 - 2011 studies of photography at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, Germany. 2012 - 2015 studies of media arts with emphasis on photography at Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany.

You can go to Linn's tumblr HERE.