How This Happened Pt 6

André Lemos and his Lisbon-based Opuntia Books comrades were one of the first groups I thought of for the show. André was in the show I co-curated last year, showing his own work.  He even painted a mural on the side of The Bridge that is still up. BENNY LAVA!

André has a great commitment to making and publishing books. His own work has a living fluid line - a giant slap of ink that seems alive even when depicting something else. He also does inventive and crazy collages and we have examples of both kinds of work up in the show.

We also have lots and lots of pages from the books he's published.  Opuntia makes books that ate beautifully printed and presented while still being "lo-fi" and inexpensive. He has artists from all over (Finland, Italy, Brazil, France etc) and publishes their work in "no reprint!" editions. I really like how André and Opuntia keep their books atthat edge of cheapness but still beautiful products.

We have a limited number of Opuntia books for sale from a variety of his artists along with a bunch of André's original pieces.

How this happened Pt 3

 First I got in touch with Craig at Cafe Royal and he reminded me of Little Paper Planes and Kelly Lynn Jones. LPP is another artist-run online store with books, prints, t-shirts and other strange items.  I've sold books and prints with Kelly before and thought having some of LPPs work in the show would be great.

The problem was the AMOUNT of stuff they have available.  So much of it is great and from a wide variety of artists from all over. I ended up asking her about the series of prints that LPP published themselves - most things they carry are made by the artists and just sold through LPP but they started up a series of books and prints that LPP commissions and sells. So I got to go shopping at LPPs print area.

These aren't books like most of the other work in the show, but I wanted to show some other ways of sending one's work out into the world and digital prints are good too*. I did a lot of printmaking in school and though I really value the handmade litho or etching, I think it's foolish to ignore the ease and cheapness of this way of working - like zines being an alternative to the precious handmade book.

"We are not your enemies
We wish to offer you vast and stange domains'
where mystery in flower offers itself to whoever wishes to pick it
there are new fires there and colors never seen"
      - Guillaume Apollinaire

I guess that could be the motto of the whole dang show...

Next - Comics that aren't comics but really are comics.

PS Kelly herself won't have any work in the show - she's busy getting ready for a solo show that opens when ours does.  I'm trying to get some work from her for the book I'm making - her work is really good.

*There's another way of getting work out - that's the next artist I thought of.

How this happened Pt 2

The first person I thought of for the show was Craig Atkinson. He's a great and prolific drawer and runs Cafe Royal where he has published and distributed lots of the kinds of books and zines I was thinking of.

In the past Craig made more traditional painting but a few years ago he stopped and started over with scratchy, simple and sketchy drawings and collages. He quickly began to publish that work in little zines and books (one of my favorites is one where he documents both why and how he made that big aesthetic switch).

In his drawing I admire and enjoy how close the work seems to his life - he draws electronic equipment he wants, celebrities and politician he sees. His lines range from crude to subtle but he seems to be always searching around, looking for things, finding unexpected images. Craig and I have been secretly working on a collaborative books for a few years and in our back and forth drawing volleys I can see him riffing and finding.

He has a great collection of his sketchbooks online and he uses raw material from those in a variety of projects.  Looking through them one can see bits of images that are later used in other books, drawings and collages. He seems to cultivate an attitude of letting work flow all over. That attitude goes into his books as well where he publishes things that seem random and strange but still interesting to him - there's a book of photographs napkins he got while on holiday in Spain and another of doorways in China.

He also publishes and distributes other artists work under the Cafe Royal Books imprint. Lately he's focussing more on photography (esp with the fantastic Field Trip Magazine - all analog photography), but he still has a bunch of  drawing based books in his arsenal. We'll have a bunch of books to sell and hopefully some of his original work to hang up, but I wanted to find a way to highlight the sheer energy of what Craig and Cafe royal have done over the past few years.

I thought of Cafe Royal Magazine, a series of books he published featuring work from a variety of artists from all over - I had a piece in the first issue (numbered "issue zero"). For Leaf and Signal I've gotten a ton of pages that were published in CR Magazine and plan to hang them in a huge wall of paper in The Bridge. I'm hoping it's a drawing OVERLOAD when one stands in front of it.

Next - who else to add to this tornado...

How this happened pt. 1

Last year Greg Kelly of The Bridge asked me to curate a show.  I had worked with Pedro Moura on a show at another Cville gallery and it seemed to go pretty well so I said ok.

I wanted to think of something that both interested me and was along the lines of community-based art that The Bridge tries to foster. I really like how they show a lot of weird and sometimes challenging work but try to also include most everyone in Cville in it.  Buzzwords - outreach, community etc. Elsewhere I've seen this kind of thing turn out bland and lame but somehow they keep it strange and crazy.

So I came up with an idea to show "lo-fi" art publishing - basically art-zines, published both in print and online. Good work by artists I respect that is also generous, democratic and, at least as a side effect, intent on getting out into the world.  So much "outreach" work is bloodless but the stuff I saw people publishing in weird booklets and online wasn't. So I started making a list of folks.

Images: Andre Lemos,  Craig Atkinson,  F. Einspruch