Tag Archive for 'philadelphia'

I’ve about filled my sketchbook now that the Hybrid Book Fair is over.

What a success! First and foremost, I need to rave about Michelle, Amanda, Mary, and Susan for their tireless work in putting this thing together. Almost 2 years in planning/emailing/accommodating/organizingorganizingorganizing for a weekend of simple brilliance. I can barely contain myself of all the love and admiration I have for these women.

Not really sure if I can summarize, let alone do justice to a wrap-up of the conference… I will say that I’ve come back from it energized and inspired and full of more questions for my own practice. Maybe I ought to leave it till the podcasts go live? (by the way, if you haven’t already, do check out Steve Miller’s amazing podcast interview series, Book Artists and Poets) For now, some liners scribbled into my book, and these are just from the panels, not even from the fair or mingling or reunion:
Susan Stewart’s oxymoron of the sign–the distance between meaning and object
The Poet is Boss
building discourse for book arts
DIY/DTP/POD/OAP and the sounds of Offset
escaping gallery hegemony with Ed Ruscha
Codes of photography/mutability
Patty Smith: Offset is genderless but macho, physical but intellectual, generous but greedy… “we only have one bathroom, so it’s illegal to hire girls”
This book belongs to offset
Barthes: text as expansive field
3-minute studio practice, 10-minute mind maps
Alice Mott: you can make the whole trip behind the headlights
Fascicles
Jen Bervin: feeling more authored in the absence of the text; the subtractive process is really an additive process
Vacuoles of digital media
Marsha MacLuhan

That’s a lot of theory in one place y’dig? Being home already is quite an adjustment. Beyond all of the great dialogue and inspiration, I’m admittedly aching to be back. We had a little (well, huge) all-alumni reunion in celebration of the conference and the 20 year anniversary of the program. I think a lot about my role and place where I am right now, and being a part of such a dynamic community, started by a group of fiercely independent and driven women at a time when they were pish-poshed for wanting to be printers in a masculine print-world… it certainly helped me feel at ease that my feet were heavier than I thought in such a supportive and nurturing environment where we all make our work.

My colleagues (the catch word of the weekend) squeezed and squeezed and squeezed each other in reunion. Mandy noted: we didn’t come away from the program with just an MFA; we left with a FAMILY. As often as we disagreed, drove each other crazy, snapped out of stress and lack of sleep, as much as we drank and drank and drank and ate buttermilk pie and cried and injured ourselves at press or in editioning or hanging from ladders underneath installation, we were all a part of this force, locked together in imprint on this strange, expansive way of making art and life with each other.

BAW I’m getting all mind-weepy again, what a spectrum of emotions. Sad to be away from friends/colleagues/artists once more, happy to have spent good quality time with them and to have basically had a 4-day sleepover, sad to not have close artist friends here to listen to me gush about the conference, strangely comforted to know that I am not alone in that endeavor as we all scattered after graduation, sad to miss the little happinesses of Philly like Capogira and taquerias, happy to feel like I am working very hard to build a life for myself in Baltimore, sad to want a closer community here with me, happy to have been a part of it all.

I wish I had more photos of the whole extravaganza, but I only managed to grab a few not-too-flattering shots of… Leisure. Instead, I’ll give you some links that you really, really, really should peruse/read/investigate (probably more to come as I think of them). Miss ya, bookies! See you soon (never soon enough).

The Hybrid Book (stay tuned for podcasts of the talks)
Book Artists and Poets podcasts by Steve Miller, from the University of Alabama
JAB
Mimeo Mimeo
Shanna Leino, maker of beautiful handcarved tools
Jen Bervin, my latest favorite book artist
Will Sanders’ 800,000 Exhibition, in which 2500 books housed in 100 crates totaling about 2 tons, honor the 800,000 killed in Rwanda in 1994.
Combat Paper, an initiative out of Green Door Studio in which veterans use papermaking to create cathartic works of art in response to their experiences in war.