The genesis of the project Unspecific Object was an open call for objects, which artist Barbara Madsen placed on social media networks and posted at www.unspecificobject.tumblr.com. People were encouraged to submit images of objects they consume past and present. They could be banal, meaningful or significant objects, stored, ignored, or hoarded.

The winners were juried by Jared Ash, Assistant Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Arezzoo Moseni, Senior Art Librarian at the New York Public Library. The physical objects were sent through snail mail to Madsen, who built the spaces for the objects, photographed them, and generated photogravures for the book. The Venezuelan poet, Ely Rosa Zamora created her interpretation of the images in verse.

An interview with the artist discussing the project can be found here: http://www.artcritical.com/2015/06/13/eric-sutphin-madsen-moseni/

Each book includes 14 photogravures by Madsen and letterpress poetry by Zamora, both printed by the artist and published by Choir Alley Press, New Jersey, in an edition of 15. The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunately to have acquired copy 6.

Barbara Madsen and Ely Rosa Zamora, Unspecific Object (New Jersey: Choir Alley Press, 2015). Letterpress and photogravures. Copy 6 of 15. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2015- in process

Maro Vandorou, Thereafter ([Dublin, CA]: Maro Vandorou; printed and bound by Sandy Tilcock, 2015). 20 unnumbered leaves. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2015- in process

“Thereafter is a limited edition handmade book of original images and writings. The conceptual focus is on capturing, depicting and interpreting the enigmatic behavior of a coral paeonia. In the course of 7 days the flower undergoes an almost mystical transformation with a profound healing effect.”

 

“Professor Albert Einstein heard himself acclaimed by George Bernard Shaw tonight as one of the handful of men in all human history who have “Created Universes.” Before a thousand guests at a dinner here Professor Einstein listened while Mr. Shaw placed him on a pedestal with the greatest thinkers of mankind. Only seven men in the history of 2,500 years, said Mr. Shaw, could share with Professor Einstein his place as a destroyer of the old absolutism and builder of the new world. The list began with Pythagoras and included Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and finally Einstein, “the greatest of our contemporaries.” –Anonymous, “Shaw Calls Einstein Universe Creator. Acclaims Scientist, the Guest at Dinner in London, as One of History’s Eight Greatest.” Special cable to the New York Times, October 29, 1930.

Shaw’s speech was delivered at a formal high-profile fund-raising dinner for ORT (Obschestvo Remeslenovo i. Zemledelcheskovo Trouda), an organization dedicated to the support of Eastern European Jewry. The setting was the ballroom of London’s Savoy Hotel in 1930.

In this newly acquired fine press edition, the full text of Shaw’s speech is reprinted, together with Albert Einstein’s response, originally delivered in German and printed here in English translation. Joesph Goldyne illustrated the volume with five etchings created especially for this publication. The drypoints, etchings, and burnished aquatints, executed with the artist’s unique graphic signature, pay tribute to the featured speakers as well as to the sense of the event.

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A portion of the actual speech has been posted here. Nice to include the laughter and the applause:

“Mary Daniel Hobson’s photocollages were created by layering photographic transparencies, stitched tissue paper, old maps, handwriting and real bird feathers. They have been reproduced here as archival pigment prints on Entrada 300 rag paper by Rhiannon Alpers at the San Francisco Art Institute. Rhiannon Alpers also printed the text in Adobe Garamond by letterpress on Coronado SST paper.”

“The circular holes in the pages were laser cut at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California, and the covers and clamshell boxes have been made at the studio of John DeMerritt, Emeryville, California.”

“Charles Hobson designed the edition and painted the night sky individually for each set of covers and for the insets with acrylic paint on Canson Mi-Tientes paper. He also assembled and bound the edition with the assistance of Alice Shaw.”–Colophon.

“The book contains five photocollages bound into a concertina spine. A sixth image is presented as a separate print signed by the artist in a folder on the inside of the back cover.”–Prospectus.


 

 

An interview with the author Amy Hempel: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2058/amy-hempel

 

 

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine.

Jamie Murphy at The Salvage Press in Dublin has published a new edition of Samuel Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its release in 1965. Beckett first wrote the prose fragment Imagination morte imaginez, in French and translated it himself to English. The new edition is a collaboration between typographic designer Jamie Murphy and the visual artist David O’Kane, with an essay by Stanley E. Gontarski, the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and a Beckett scholar who specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies. https://instagram.com/thesalvagepress/

The Salvage Press is a new studio, devoted to preserving, promoting and pursuing excellence in design, typography & letterpress printing. You can follow them at: http://websta.me/n/thesalvagepress

   

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Imagination Dead Imagine. A collaboration between typographic designer Jamie Murphy & visual artist David O’Kane. Essay by Stanley E. Gontarski. (Dublin: Savage Press, 2015). Copy 2 of 40. Graphic Arts Collection GA2015- in process.

Colophon:

This new edition of loose sheets celebrates the 50th anniversary of the original publishing in 1965. The project is a collaboration between typographic designer Jamie Murphy & visual artist David O’Kane. The work is introduced with an essay by renowned Beckett scholar Stanley E. Gontarski.

The text has been hand-set & letterpress printed by Jamie Murphy in 18 point Caslon Old Face, supported by a newly drawn ten line grotesque typeface by Bobby Tannam, cut from maple by Tom Mayo. David O’Kane has supplied two lithographs inspired by the text, editioned by Thomas Franke at Stein Werk Lithography studio in Leipzig. The sheets are printed on 250 gsm French made Venin Cuve BFK Rives mouldmade.

The edition is limited to 50 copies, 40 of which make up the standard format, ten accounting for the de luxe. The bindings were executed by Tom Duffy in Dublin. The standard is housed in a cloth covered portfolio, protected inside a slipcase. The de luxe is presented in a clam-shell box accompanied by a typographic triptych based on the text. The standard copies are numbered 11-50, the de-luxe are numbered 1-10. Each copy has been signed by the collaborators.

Notes on the images: The two images included in this edition were made using a lithography technique called Schablithografie. This lithography technique is highly labour intensive and involves scratching away at a surface of the blackened lithographic stone to form the image; literally scraping light forms out of darkness, reinforcing the constructed nature of the text, which Beckett goes to great lengths to emphasise.

The first image is a kind of schematic. It is not fully formed and harkens back to Greek and Roman style images, suggesting a metaphorical excavation. The letters and image turn it into a kind of logotype [literally word-imprint in Greek] or emblem and form a bridge between the text and the image.

The second image is larger. The unusual format of the image echoes the formatting of the prose text as it appears in this edition. There are noticeable discrepancies between what Beckett describes and what is depicted in the image. The image is in fact a failed attempt to portray what is fabricated in the story. What interested the artist in staging it is the fact that the positions and space Beckett describes are anatomically impossible without gross distortion of the human body. Beckett would have known this as he also sketched the space out in his notes. So he deliberately stresses the cramped nature of the scenario. The fact remains that in the artist’s mind’s eye the extreme positions were not exactly related to what is described in the story. The spatial discrepancies are only revealed completely when the space is mapped out point for point.

The finalised lithographs are a combination of the mental image conjured up during the initial reading of the text and the interpretation of the physical reenactment made in the artist’s studio.

Typoretum: A Letterpress Workshop from Jamie Murphy on Vimeo.

Michele Burgess, of Brighton Press, writes: “I asked Chard [deNiord] how he felt about the idea of ‘night’ as an archive of thought. He sent me these poems. After reading them I thought about and drew shafts of moonlight and sunlight in the woods of Vermont.

Chard had recently and reluctantly cut down 100 trees to protect his house from falling limbs and to create a meadow on his property. This seemed a very dramatic event to me, as a woman from the arid southwest, and I was captured by the duality expressed in it.

I used those trees as metaphors for his poems to explore the way darkness orients and reorients itself in nature and in the human imagination. The paintings felt necessary to add physicality to the blackness and to enclose the etchings.”

This fall, Chard deNiord will be named Vermont’s eighth Poet Laureate. A cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry, he is the author of Asleep in the Fire (1990), Sharp Golden Thorn (2003), Night Mowing (2005), and The Double Truth (2011). His latest poetry collection, Interstate, is due out next month.

DeNiord joins an exclusive club of official Green Mountain bards. Vermont’s first poet laureate, Robert Frost, was appointed in 1961 and served until 1963. He was followed many years later by Kinnell (1989-93), Louise Glück (1994-98), Ellen Bryant Voigt (1999-2002) Grace Paley (2003-07), Ruth Stone (2007-11) and Lea (2011-15). –this is taken in part from “Chard deNiord Appointed Next Vermont Poet Laureate,” Posted by Ken Picard on Mon, Aug 24, 2015.

Michele Burgess is the Director of Brighton Press and a prolific artist. For more information, see:
http://www.ebrightonarts.com/public/index/index.php