Shared Storytelling: New Acquisitions
Curatorial Statement
This artists’ book exhibition includes new works donated to Franklin Furnace Archive in between 2018 to 2022. “New Acquisitions” brings together 12 artists, ranging from Gen Z students to long-practicing book artists. Their works experiments with diverse printing methods including lithography, risograph and historical photograph process. This collection of works examines the role of memory and the power of shared storytelling in shaping narratives.
This selection introduces a new generation of book makers from art communities that use cooperative approaches to reflect on our times. Passing On: Elegy/Eulogy to 2020 compiles observations of the pandemic from student artists at VCU, using typography and illustration to share their Covid memories. Best Laid Plans, self-published by Katie Garth, explores objects and routines in the year of 2020. The connections between book-making networks speak to the responsive role of artists’ books and the practices of collective production. The efforts, talents, and ideas of multiple individuals come together to create a cohesive work.
A recurring theme throughout these works is that of collaborative labor across time and history. From acts of appropriation and reinvention, these artists brought to life new works. Historical works were reimagined: In Splendor Solis, Fred Cray adds his own illustrative touches to a medieval alchemical manuscript and Du hasard dans la production artistique incorporates personal images with an essay by August Strindberg. The role of chance is further explored in With Inger, where Aimée Beaubien retroactively collaborates with the woman whose photographs she accidentally discovered. These books appropriate images from others’ art, yet create a new perspective through their modifications and reconfigurations.
“New Acquisitions” is curated by Fang-Yu Liu and Nicole Rosengurt. To learn more about the individual books, descriptions below. To see even more books, visit Franklin Furnace Archive at franklinfurnace.org
ALL BOOKS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION
Untitled
2018
Scott Hug
Hand printed and bound by Kayrock Screenprinting in Brooklyn, this artist’s book by Scott Hug is a much smaller version of his “world’s largest zine” created for the 2008 New York Art Book fair. The more intimate scaling does nothing to diminish the power of the imagery, which juxtaposes grainy, abstracted photographs taken from the NASA space program and gay porn.
Lubb Dup
1998
Ann Tyler
Tyler details the events which lead up to the killing of Scott Amedure by Jonathon Schmitz after the former confesses on “The Jenny Jones Show” to having a romantic crush on Schmitz. Spiral bound with die-cuts, tunnels, pull-outs, and translucent pages, this beautifully eerie book demands an intimate reading in which emotions are layered and complicated. Lubb and Dup, the two sounds of each heartbeat, serve both as a metaphor of Amedure’s crush and a reminder that he was killed by a shotgun blast to the heart.
Splendor Solis
2019
Fred Cray
The book is ostensibly a treatise on alchemy with the original publication dating 1582. The copy is used here as a backdrop for Cray’s inserted photographs, and have been distressed with a hammer, sandpaper, and paint. The unique photographs inserted are images of the sun, a focal point of alchemy. Since the treatise on alchemy has never allowed anyone to actually make gold, Cray has leafed part of one page with authentic 24 karat gold as wry consolation. - artist’s statement
Light Blue Desire: A Manual for the Color Blue
2018
Magali Duzant
Light Blue Desire investigates the fluidity of language by lyrically mapping the elusive use of the word blue across different languages. The collection of idioms reveals a compendium of contradictions; concepts around a color that is both high and low, peaceful and pornographic, melancholic and manipulative, and consistently voted the world's favorite color. How and why does blue seep into our speech, color our thoughts, lap into our languages? The book's format and typography draw influence from technical manuals, while the chapter design nods to the cyanometer, an eighteenth-century hand-painted instrument used to measure the blueness of the sky. These elements are balanced by the whimsical design of the blue idioms, which mimic the inherent nature of the idiom itself, an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements.The book arose from the question, how do you define blue? It is structured as a manual to the loose, fluid, ever changing conception of color- its perception as well as its place in language. - Printed Matter
No. 8
2021
KATAK (Katherine Wickins)
This screen-printed book chronicles a day in the life of Otto the 8-Ball, a character created by the artist who appears in much of their work. No.8 follows a lonely yet optimistic 8 ball who doesn’t seem to know what to feel or say. Otto is seen in different scenarios of everyday life, seemingly surrounded by a feeling of emptiness and melancholy. However, we learn that at the end of the day, Otto is open and hopeful to the promising outcome of tomorrow. - artist’s website
With Inger
2018
Aimée Beaubien
At the core of With Inger is a chance encounter with a three-ring binder of 35mm black and white contact sheets dating from the early 1970's. Aimée Beaubien combines her own photographs with those of a stranger. Guided by the photographs of Inger Helene Boasson, Beaubien builds bridges between past and future via the visual records of two women, unknown to one another.
Through an unfolding visual expedition of the geographic, architectural, and social landscape of Iceland, Beaubien's book embodies an incomplete archive while conjuring a woman whose works were left to the historical periphery. - artist’s website
Du hasard dans la production artistique (Chance in artistic production)
2018
Annika Baudry, Karin Lewin, and Orjan Wikstrom
This artists’ book is a collaboration of two Swedish artists, Karin Lewin and Orjan Wikstrom, living and working in Paris. They were inspired by an essay written by August Strindberg in Paris 1894 with the title "New directions in Art! Or the role of chance in artistic creation." This text was written in French by the famous Swedish playwright, who often experimented with new creative ways of working, even in painting and photography. Karin Lewin explored Strindberg’s approach by using a Kodak instamatic camera as a background for dramatical insertions, juxtaposing her personal story and afterwards hand painting the prints with acrylic paint. Orjan Wikstrom, often inspired by the Danish painter Hammershøi’s world, hand-colored the gray engravings. - publisher's statement
Passing On: Elegy/Eulogy to 2020
2021
Cassandra Ellison
The publication Passing On: Elegy/Eulogy to 2020 was created as part of the Spring 2021 semester of Type & Image, a typography course taught by Cassandra Ellison in the Communication Arts department at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, Richmond, Virginia. Using typography and illustration to convey their own stories, this anthology memorializes 13 undergraduate students' reflections on individual and collective experiences of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, when classes were online, making a physical book containing their stories was like creating a time capsule for them. - editor’s statement
Best Laid Plans
2020
Katie Garth
Best Laid Plans positions a self-published artist’s book as the central object in an immersive narrative environment. Within a story about the artist’s personal tendency for order, she considers the merits of planning, asking how preparation functions as a form of escapism. The narrative investigates familiar objects and daily routines, underscoring their reassuring qualities and, simultaneously, their potential to be leveraged in pursuit of disembodiment and catharsis.
You Are Eternity, You Are the Mirror
2020
Marcy Palmer
You Are Eternity, You Are the Mirror is an exploration of beauty as an antidote to personal and political crises. In times of heartache, disaster, and impasse, many turn to beauty in the natural world for solace and refuge. In this project, often overlooked wildflowers and botanicals are used, highlighted, and elevated by being gilded. The images were made from plants and flowers, which were photographed, printed on vellum, and hand applied with 24k or 18k gold leaf, varnish, and wax to create the final images. The project is inspired by Anna Atkins's botanical studies as well as surrealist photographers who manipulated imagery and materials such as Florence Henri, Dora Maar,and Maurice Tabard. Pairing these images with the writings of Kahlil Gibran underscores the significance and multiplicity of the notion of beauty in our lives.
From NOHO to SOHO
2013
Irene Christensen
Having experienced life as a New Yorker both before and after 9/11, Irene Christensen reflects upon the city as she saw it then and as she sees it now. For years, her daily walks downtown took her beneath some of the outdoor public art of Manhattan - those enormous not-to-be ignored billboards above Lafayette Street. From NOHO to SOHO is one of the accordion books in a series which expresses the artist’s interpretations of New York City.
Keepsakes
2016
Sal Taylor Kydd
This book explores how we preserve memories and how the discoveries we make when exploring the natural world, rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood. It also nods to the secrets and mysteries contained within the landscape, as both a reflection of time's passing but also our collective memory.The title poem, Keepsakes, runs throughout the book from folio to folio spanning the entirety of the book. This sequencing of image and text, or absence of text, sets up a pacing of the material that allows the viewer to experience the book in a series of steps. Each folio can stand on its own as a keepsake, or be experienced collectively with the others in the book. The book is presented in a box hand-made by the artist in collaboration with Richard Smith of Camden, Maine.
All images taken by Franklin Furnace Archive.
Curator Bios
Fang-Yu Liu catalogs artists’ books, archives artworks and artists’ files, creates structures, organizes performance events, works/ talks with artists in their studios, knots, grows plants, learns how to think, to care and to love.
Nicole Rosengurt is an arts-worker and archivist born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated with her BA in Art History from Grinnell College in 2020, and is her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2023. Her research and collecting interests include visual ephemera such as posters and postcards, design history, zines and artist’s books.
Online exhibition designed by Rohan Subramaniam, FF Intern, Fall 2024.
Poster design by Huiyu Yang.
