The Artist’s Name, Book/Zine Name: Sally Alatalo, (for example, pictures of empty sky)
Where It Was Published: Sara Ranchouse Publishing
What Materials Were Used: Paper, Binding thread
Describe the Use of Text and Font: Text is minimal and kept to the beginning and end of the book, it mostly focuses on showing off this “blank” image of an empty sky. Font is simple, small, and clean cut.
Describe the Use of Imagery: Alatalo uses the idea of the empty sky combined with the text to comment on the impossibility of things such as the sky being truly empty.
Describe the Content: The text is abstract and reflective, as the artist tries to comes to terms with certain “impossible” concepts. This book is part of a series of similar ones that all grapple with similar ideas concerning limits of understanding and space.
Describe Layout: The book is laid out so each page is visible and open in its entirely, presenting every image of the empty sky as the true “content” of the book.
Is it a collaborative work or singular vision?: Singular vision.
The Artist’s Name, Book/Zine Name: Angela Lorenz, Pandora’s Hieroglyphic Primer
Where It Was Published: Center for Book Arts
What Materials Were Used: Cloth with safety pins, silk screened and hand colored
Describe the Use of Text and Font: Text is bold but simple and arranged into sometimes rhyming small stanzas of poetry on each page. Some text is replaced with images, some random word replacements with symbols that represent them, and others…
Describe the Use of Imagery: …symbols associated with womanhood, things like snakes, homes, and lashed eyes.
Describe the Content: The text of the book explores womanhood and the responsibility, burden, and blame that is often pushed on women, alluding to many historical and mythological women that were punished for rebelling against these constrictions in one way or another, like Cleopatra, Eve, Melusine, Lilith, Pandora, and others. It seemingly alludes to feminist writing with phrases like “A woman is only a snake in disguise, waiting to be discovered by a voyeur’s eyes,” similar to a quote from Margaret Atwood’s Robber Bride, “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Describe Layout: The book is kept inside a cloth envelope and is a series of cloth sheets held together with a safety pin, to be opened and then flipped through by the reader.
Is it a collaborative work or singular vision?: Singular vision.
The Artist’s Name, Book/Zine Name: Candace Hicks, Common Threads
Where It Was Published: Self Published
What Materials Were Used: Candace Hicks, Embroidery on Canvas
Describe the Use of Text and Font: Text is hand embroidered and appears as neat handwriting. Adds to the intimacy of the piece.
Describe the Use of Imagery: The artist uses mundane things in ways we don’t expect, for example, a standard fifty cent composition notebook made entirely from cloth and just embroidered to emulate that.
Describe the Content: Combined with the aforementioned imagery, the book runs through a series of mundane events and overhearings that comment on and subvert mundanity itself, posing it as an illusion. Anything, even a figment of a conversation or a cheap notebook, can be made into something of interest.
Describe Layout: Formatted exactly like a marbled notebook, complete with lined “paper” and margins.
Is it a collaborative work or singular vision?: Singular vision.
