"Fiona Banner has long been fascinated by how signs translate experience. She has used the written word like a picture to represent a film; she has made sculptures of punctuation marks to show how an icon functions. Her work reminds us of the true meaning of 'iconic', it takes a sign and reminds us of its power."
"Over the last twenty years, Uta Barth has been steadily producing a body of work that stands apart from the dominate trajectory of photography.That trajectory has always been rooted in making a visual record of things in the world.This descriptive function of photography is so fundamental to our understanding of what the medium is and does that it can be hard even to register alternative approaches.Certainly we can see the traces of the visible world in Barth's photographs.They are not exercises in abstraction.Nonetheless, description of the world is not her primary aim.Instead, Barth is interested in pursuing issues of perception: of how we see as much or more than what we see."
With powerful, confident gestures, Judy Ledgerwood fills her gigantic canvases with rows of large forms, such as circles and loops, which initially recall such male-dominated styles as Abstract Realism or Pop art. But Ledgerwood's formal vocabulary is also full of references to ornamental and crafts traditions and decorative color combinations.
"You would not know where to begin to read the image. It looks simple enough. [...] There are so many routes into the image, so many points of recognition within the composition, and yet you do not know where to begin and, for that matter, where to close off or frame your reading. In Paul Winstanley s work the image is defined according to a frame of perception, where the image exists both to represent a scene witnessed, and to convey a position for the viewer within that. This much is given. Where the witness once was so now you stand in a reconstruction of the scene. This much you think you know."
The catalogue gorillagorillagorillawas published in conjunction with Diana Thater's exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz and includes an introductory text by Peter Pakesch and essays by Adam Budak, Bergit Arends, Frans B. M. de Waal, Laurence A. Rickels, Giorgio Agamben and Jason Smith. The catalogue's image part comprises both installation shots from the Kunsthaus Graz and a photographic essay by Diana Thater with an index "These Are Their Names" and a visual material taken during the filming of gorillagorillagorillain Cameroon.
Published on the occasion of The Drawing Center's exhibition, Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings presents a selection of nearly 100 works on paper from the artist's ongoing series of commissioned drawings derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. While public protests and mass demonstrations are often associated with the politics of the 1960s, Tiravanija's ongoing project reconsiders their relevance in today's political climate. The Demonstration Drawings provide a perspectival view of collective actions, political protests, and popular sovereignty movements worldwide turning ephemeral images of strife and social conflict into documents of political aspiration. The book, number 79 in the Drawing Papers series, features a newly commissioned essay, Making the News New Again, by author and journalist David Rieff, as well as a text by the exhibition curator, Joao Ribas.
Paperback: 142 pages
Publisher: The Drawing Center; First edition (September 11, 2008)
Catalogue produced in conjunction with Kerry Tribe's 2005-2006 Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin and the artist's residency at the International Studio Program of the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
Born in Berlin in 1958 and now based in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is among the most influential artists working with photography to have emerged in the last decade. Her photographs take the complete opposite approach to the famous Dusseldorf school of photographers which include Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. While they record their subjects in sharply objective archival detail, Barth's images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads or natural environments are often out of focus, perversely cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject. Yet what emerges from this reduction and abstraction of subject matter is a body of photographs of extraordinary, haunting beauty, evocative of great moments in the history of painting, from Vermeer to Whistler, or of a cinematic ambience such as the fume-laden neon haze of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
"General Idea Editions 1967-1995" was published by the Blackwood Gallery to accompany the traveling retrospective exhibition of editioned works by the seminal artists¹ collective General Idea. Containing over 200 full-page b&w and colour reproductions, the 320-page book documents the complete editions produced from 1967 (in the two years prior to the official formation of the group in 1969), through the vast array of works that spanned their historic 25-year collaboration until 1994, the year in which Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal died from AIDS-related causes. The visual documentation concludes with "XXX Voto (for the Spirit of Miss General Idea"), published posthumously by the group¹s sole surviving member AA Bronson in 1995.
Paperback: 321 pages
Publisher: Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto (March 2003)
This is the second artist's book made by Fiona Banner and the first publication from the Vanity Press. Her first book, The Nam, was a sizable 2.338kg volume of 1,000 leaves of text describing shot by shot six Vietnam War buddy movies (AM207). All The World's Fighter Planes, 2004, is very different. The book is also without text, except for the residual and fractured words around the images cut-out from newspapers: on page 74 a Lynx helicopter seems to have a rotary blade made from newsprint.
Rule Book is an extensive collection of guides, instructions, manuals and rules that have been amassed by Angela Bulloch. They are taken from sources as disparate as: parking restrictions, the Ten Commandments, the standing order of the House of Commons, hankie colour codes, Birkenstock care tips and the detoxification diet.
North is West / South is East is organized around a series of drawings collected from strangers I approached at Los Angeles International Airport and asked to make maps of LA. Around half were drawn by people who actually live in Southern California. These tend to trace commutes, diagram neighborhoods, and mark the locations of events and environments significant in the lives of their makers. The rest were made by visitors from all over the world - Australia, Mexico, Hungary, New Jersey. These start to picture the idea of a Los Angeles that precedes it: palm trees and traffic, surfers and freeways, Baywatch, money and grids. Taken together these chance encounters begin to describe a place at once real and imagined. And in drawing from the generosity of strangers at LAX, the project hopes to disturb the instrumental logic of the airport, itself a non-place, where the only reason you visit is to get yourself somewhere else.
Known for his paintings based on photographs of uninhabited interiors and landscapes, British painter Paul Winstanley has been doing basically the same thing for a long time.Winstanley works with a range of subtle effects taken from photographic technologies. Particularly notable are the digital-like shifts in saturation that play out over a number of the works, where it sometimes feels, when walking from one canvas to the next, as though the brightness has been turned up on the world.Drained of colour, the artificial light from fluorescent lamps travels across the steel and glass construction, drawing our eyes along the empty passage.
Hardcover: 120 pages
Publisher: Maureen Paley Interim Art (December 2, 2000)
Catalog of a group exhibition held at the Salzurger Kunstverein, 3 June-18 July, 1999. Consists of artist's pages by Andrea Bowers, Jessica Bronson, Sam Durant, T. Kelly Mason, Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Eric Saks; with an essay by Diana Thater. Printed in blue on pink and fuschia paper; spiral-bound.
Barth's work draws its strength from its blurring of the familiar and strange, bringing the viewer to a liminal space between the two. It is in this space that Barth begins her investigation into the very nature of perception, where the epistemological importance of such formal qualities as lighting and composition becomes astoundingly evident. Uta Barth: In Between Spaces is the first comprehensive book on Barth's oeuvre, presenting a carefully selected survey of her works, and as such is a must-have for viewers, collectors and students attracted to contemporary art and photography. The poetic resonance, radical intelligence and sheer beauty of Barth's pictures are given perfect illustration in this book, designed with the artist herself. Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm.
Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Henry Art Gallery; illustrated edition edition (November 15, 2000)
Satellite, a book conceived and constructed by Angela Bulloch, samples texts written by numerous writers, ranging from Ulf Poschard to Mae West. Organized around current interests pursued by the artist, her own work, photographs, and other material in the book are divided into the following sections: " Places," "Behavior," "Vehicles," "Time Passing," "Construction" and "Tools." Included are examples of Bulloch's early videos, collaborative work with Liam Gilick, her interactive drawing machines through to her most recent work "Superstructure with Satellites."
Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Black Dog; Bilingual edition edition (September 1, 1998)
The Nam is a 1000 page all text flick book. It is a compilation of total descriptions of well known Vietnam films, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now!, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. The films apparently never begin or end, but are described in their entirety, spliced together to make a gutting 11 hour supermovie.
Published in April 1997 by Frith Street Books and The Vanity Press with assistance from the Arts Council of England. The Nam is a 1000 page, 280,000 word hardback. Available from Frith Street Gallery, London at £250.00 and all leading bookshops in the UK and abroad.
