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Anteism is a Canadian publisher working with galleries and artists to produce unique art books. Our blog showcases the books we produce and the artist books we love!

Sarah Magazine

Sara - Zine 100 artists from around the world contributed an artwork to this A5, 96-page magazine - fullcolour cover and black/magenta/white insides, threadless bound - to help out raising money for Sarah's operation.

Sarah was born almost deaf and recently got a cochlear implant in her right ear, which helps her hear sounds she never realized existed. The second implant in her left ear has been scheduled for 2009, but since medical insurance will only cover one operation, she'll have to pay the full 25.000 euro bill all by herself...

sarah_implant

To help her out, 100 artists join forces to realize a publication and donate the full proceeds to her operation.For more information on Sarah and her situation please write us on sarah_magazine@hotmail.com. To order your copy NOW for 15 euros (worldwide postage included), check the details in the blog "How to order".

Magazine contributions by Apetown (BE), Astrid Yskout (BE), Atsuko Ishii (JP), Babs Decruyenaere (BE), Bam Bam Ink (AR), Bert Lezy (BE), Bfree (NL), Bitches In Control (NL), Boris Servais (BE), Brecht Vandenbroucke (BE), Brendan Monroe (US), Bruno Savona (IT), Büro/Atelier (NL), Carakter Atypik (FR), Craig Atkinson (UK), Danielle Lemaire (NL), Daxodiva (DE), De Klup (BE), Dennis Tyfus (BE), Duudle (DK), Elisabeth Noels (BE), Ephameron (BE), Evah Fan (US), Eyeformation (US), Fanny Garcia (FR), Federica Ubaldo (IT), Fichtre (CH), Francesca Iurilli (CH), Gemma Correll (UK), Guillaume Jolly (FR), Havec (FR), herr sommerferien (BE), Inge Cornil (BE), Izja Rutten (BE), Jack Usine (FR), Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen (NL), Jiem (FR), John Bobaxx (FR), Julien Kedryna (FR), K (FR), Kati Heck (DE), Kiki (NL), Korneel Detailleur (BE), Kris Delacourt (BE), Lamelos (NL), Leen Van Hulst (BE), Lennard Schuurmans (NL), Lieven Segers (BE), LLCoolJo (FR), Logan Hicks (US), Louis Reith (NL), Luke Ramsey (CA), M!CH Decruyenaere (BE), Marcus Oakley (UK), Marie Rosen (BE), Marilou (FR), Matthew Feyld (CA), Max-o-matic (AR), Mehdi (FR), Mentary (CH), Michèle Matyn (BE), Mike Swaney (CA), Miruki Tusko (BE), Miss Lotion (DK), Morcky (IT), Nazario Graziano (IT), Neasden Control Centre (UK), N'Roll (FR), Oles (NL), Pacolli (BR), Philip Paquet (BE), Pinda! (BE), Prutpuss (BE), Rachel Agnew (BE), Rim (BR), Robert Rebotti (IT), Sarah Vanbelle (BE), Sebastiaan Van Doninck (BE), Seldon Hunt (US), Sighn (US), Specio (FR), Sumo (LU), Swoon (US), Tastest (CH), Thomas Mazzarella (BE), Tina Scott (DE), Tom Gauld (UK), Tommi Musturi (FI), Tony Papin (FR), Vaast Colson (BE), Ward Zwart (BE), Wayne Horse (DE), Yoko Nono (FR), ZBK (PL) and Zeroten (UK)...

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The Coast Reviews Brain Trust

Dave Hayden of Halifax newspaper The Coast reviews James Kirkpatrick and Peter Thompson's new book Brain Trust.

The Coast Newspaper Reviews Brain Trust

“In almost every art form, collaboration is integral, if not vital in inspiring and evolving an artist's career. But most painters, printmakers and sculptors prefer to work in isolation. There is one exception to that rule---graffiti. In the world of street art, collaboration is pretty much the norm, with artists putting up pieces side by side on a wall or a train, sometimes working into each other's characters or, over time, putting new works overtop old. Think, too, of gallery installations by longtime partners/graffiti artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, where whole walls are taken over by a patchwork of interwoven styles. That is exactly where the beauty lies in this magnificent book by James Kirkpatrick (see his work at Studio 21) and Peter Thompson, two artists who've been collaborating together and with others their whole lives. The playful collaborative paintings and drawings bask in the interplay between Thompson's well-controlled characters and Kirkpatrick's unravelling abstractions, creating dream-like scenes that demand careful exploration. Some pieces were also worked into by Juxtapoz mag heroes Marc Bell, Nick Di Genova and (Paper Rad member) Beau Labute, which only illustrates the potential when these guys stay up passing around sheets of paper.” -Dave Hayden

Steven Harrington - Interview

Steven Harrington from Arkitip, Inc.

Harrington's work is influenced by Time-Life Encyclopedias 1965-1972, thrift stores and the 60s pysch sounds of The Moody Blues, his art might be termed 'contextual objectivism'.

"Our Mountain", is a traveling art experience with works by Steven Harrington and Justin Krietemeyer.  The exhibit will start in Paris then travels on through Barcelona, Milan and Berlin.

Possible Jail Time and Fine for Mail Art

Possible jail time for this mail art? Is mailing something like this a crime? Does it make sense to face a sentence of three years jail time and fines over $100,000 USD? Why is the image of a naked woman a criminal offense? After viewing a couple images of Pissier's artwork I can see why his artwork would offend some. The limited images on the net that I've seen include bondage and could be considered violent. I understand the idea of mail art, but is it ok for an artist to force a delivery person to deliver something they don't agree with? Ask yourselves these questions, and keep them in mind when reading about the Philip Pissier.

Here are his words translated from French:

” As you probably know, I am currently enmeshed in a legal situation where I am at risk of three years of jail time and a fine of 75,000 euros for a misunderstood creative project.

To summarize, in May or June 2008 I sent four postcards intended for an exposure of Mail Art entitled “Erotic Moments” curated by Mr Mark Falkant (Sodener Str. 20 / 65779 Kelkheim / Allemagne). The artworks are collages made from postcards of the pastoral village of Castelnau-Montratier (in Southern France), and old photographs of a girlfriend, taken around 1991-92, with two to three clothespins on her nipples.

I sent them, without adding them in an envelope, as is the norm, for purists of “postal art”. After having participated and showing my erotic Mail Art for the past 25 years, I didn’t think that they could pose problem.

Of course, there was a problem. The Postal Director of my village informed me one day that the Director of the Sorting office of Cahors had been “extremely moved” by the postcard. I know well that I’m not a terrible erotic photographer, but it was seemingly good that the work moved him.

I paid little attention to this business, although from then on I had the telephone number of the Director. I do not have time to confer with him on the issue, I was working for nine months developing the First International Festival of Email-Art of my village: The famous «Rencontres de l’Art Postal» (blog : http://montratier.canalblog.com).

A few days before the inauguration of this festival, I received an notice insisting I present myself to the Gendarmerie of Castelnau-Montratier because of a “file related to me”. I go there, and they end up interviewing me, within the framework of a preliminary investigation, on the behalf of people who do not have the decency, to introduce themselves (I later learned I was summoned by the “Brigade of Search of the Gendarmerie of Cahors”.). First, they asked me questions about my professional life, they showed my postcards (under court seal) and tell me that someone filed a complaint against me using the article 227-24 of the New Penal code, which stipulates that - the simple act of making, traveling with or transporting, and promoting by any ways a message with a violent or pornographic content or with the intention of hurting human dignity can be punishable with 3 years in jail and 500 000 euros when the message can be seen by an underage person.”

I answered : “the mailbox is managed by an adult, the postman and the other employees are also - and the same goes for the recipient.”

And my interrogator countered with: “Yes, but imagine that the postman has your cards in his hand, that they happen to fall, and then suddenly a minor appears who happens upon them. This is likely to happen.”

I was genuinely speechless.

In the same context, imagine a flying saucer full of aliens flying above the mailbox to take the postcard and send it to a kindergarten. It seems just as likely.

They keep questioning me, over and over again. They want to know everything about my private life and my girlfriends. They ask me if I’m sane and they also asked me if I’m a freemason who has attained “perfect self-control”.

Then, they left me with a “democratic” choice between going to jail or a search warrant.

I choose the search warrant for two reasons. First: we are July 3rd. Our festival starts July 15th and I’m right in the middle of finishing the last important details. I don’t want to waste any time. Secondly, even though I appreciate BDSM, I don’t really want to spend the night with these good men.

What a mistake! After messing up my apartment, they took my computer, my loyal iMac, all my professional contacts - all ready to inflate their case against me.

Life goes on. I succeeded in organizing the festival, thanks to the unexpectedly kind assistance of the many villagers and their neighbors. My sincere thanks to those kind people, but the challenges have been driving me to take sedatives.

The Festival’s schedule, the list of arts, the guest list (among them guests from as far away as Belgrade), everything is in the seized computer.

On the morning of the 15, twenty minutes before the opening of the festival, two local police came to visit the show (without buying a ticket), to undoubtedly check the morality of this one.

Despite all these adventures, the event took place and had a degree of success. One could only imagine what could have been the real success without these obstacles and distractions. But my organization, the RGBD (“Rue des Graphismes et de la Bande Dessinée”), will not lose money.

The festival closed on July 20th, and after that I relaxed a little. On August 26th, I saw my laywer Maître Baduel of the Bar of Paris, We decided on a system of defense, and the counter-attack was launched.

It is clear that all the procedures of the local police were completely abusive and illegal. Everything in this business is ludicrous: abusive use of an article of the New Penal code (originally the article wasn’t created for this purpose), abusive procedure, and violations of my private life. Moreover, the state answered to journalists that “the investigation continues”. But an investigation on what? The complaint was deposited against me using the article 227-24, the authorities have the postcards, they know the context (german show) and the culprit (me). Or, there is an investigation on something else, the abuses I received, maybe?

Step by step, the story was broadcast, first in the local press (thanks to Florian Moutafian from the French newspaper “La dépêche du midi”), regionally (“L’echo”), nationally with the articles of L.L de Mars in “CQFD” and Agnes Giard (blog of the newspaper “Liberation”). The international press followed (“the New Yorker”, “El Universal” in Mexico, etc). “France Info” will interview us little later. A blog of artistic support, penned by various political cartoonists was also created (in French : http://soutienpissier.canalblog.com/).

That’s the present situation.

I don’t believe it’s necessary to give up, even if the situation seems incredible in a “so-called” democracy. And sometimes I wonder how they can even call our system democratic

A Committee of Support has been started for those interested :

Comité de Soutien à Philippe Pissier,

c/o Libraithèque

« Le Droit à la Paresse »

68 rue Saint-James, 46000 Cahors, France.

Phone. 05.65.22.01.51.

Contact : Michel Guillaumin,

06.79.89.13.18.

miguillaumin@wanadoo.fr

Presently, we need to bring the maximum amount of attention to this story in the sincere hope that with enough voices behind us, this case may be dismissed.

Thank you for support and for reading this lengthy story!

Philippe Pissier, october 2008. “

James Kirkpatrick - Foolish Mortals

james_kirkpatrickkirkpatrick_textkirkpatrick_image2 James Kirkpatrick has a show coming up at Studio 21 entitled "Foolish Mortals" which is a series of new paintings. Check out James' collaborative work with Peter Thompson in our newly released book Brain Trust.

"I have recently revisited science fiction and adventure comics of the 50's, 60's, and my childhood in the 80’s. This return to what originally gave me the urge to create art has sparked in me the initiative to once again make my own comics, and to create figures with possible identities and histories.

Looking at my collection of old graphic novels, I was reminded of my attraction to the quickly done line work and mistaken colour placement that appears on less important characters in the background of older comic panels. I would watch for errors and often correct or alter the comic with pen and pencil crayon, as if these mistakes gave me permission to participate with the author. In my mind I was helping out—putting on the finishing touches and completing the visual language of the story. The majority of the paintings for Foolish Mortals began with drawings based on figures and characters from my own comics, new and old. In the painted representations of these characters I have purposely worked in a manner that copies the imperfect colouring and loose-yet-confident line work I would often consider accidental. In these paintings I have also created marks using pencil and pencil crayon to fill in the details of the figures in a fashion similar to that which I would use in "fixing" comics from my own collection.

Whereas figures and shapes in my previous paintings were defined by allowing the colours and lines to develop through a process of layering and editing, the work in Foolish Mortals gets much more directly to the point with new deliberate colour placement, detailing, and line work. "

-James Kirkpatrick

James Kirkpatrick was born in London, Ontario, and graduated with a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2002. He has taken part in many exhibitions as both artist and curator, nationally and internationally from Ontario to Quebec and California to New York. His work is in numerous private and public collections, and commissions include: Buck 65: Synethesia, Album cover art, Endemic Music, Halifax, NS., Interior Mural, P.R.S. DJ Services, London, ON., and Lower Haight Banner Project, Upper Playground, San Francisco, CA. His most recent achievement is an artist residency that will take place at Struts Gallery in New Brunswick.

An Autopsy of the Book Business

An Autopsy of the Book Business

by Jason Epstein

Page one of an article posted on TheDailyBeast.com

Roll over, Gutenberg! Publishing legend Jason Epstein says the only way to save the book industry is to get rid of all the books.

While it may deliver the fatal blow, the financial crisis is only the proximate cause of the book publishing industry’s difficulties. The deeper cause is structural and its symptoms have been visible, though largely unacknowledged, for years. In a series of lectures at the New York Public Library a decade ago, I traced the origins of this structural deformation to the great post-war exodus from city to suburb. This vast migration turned the book business upside down, transforming it from a modestly profitable, stable industry of fifty or so firms dependent on predictable backlist sales—i.e., the long tail—to a game of roulette in which agents and authors own a casino where publishers can’t win.

"Madoff’s clients would not be out a penny today had they read Dickens’ Little Dorrit."

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on. But it was the major independents with their sophisticated backlists—50,000 to 100,000 or more titles, displayed spine out—serving the interests of cosmopolitan readers, on which the industry relied. To linger in these stores was an education in itself and all the schooling a publisher needed. It was these backlists—titles that had covered their initial costs, earned out their authors’ advances, entailed no further risk than the cost of making and shipping the book itself—whose individual sales might be small but whose aggregate sale was in the millions, that sustained the industry. Bestsellers in those days were icing on the backlist cake.

What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity’s backlist, our collective memory. I do not refer simply to the classics but to recent titles, hundreds of which are published every year and join the backlist long enough to move the civilizing dialogue forward. Without these books we would not know who we are, where we came from or where we may be going: they are the ongoing interplay of the present with the past, the confrontation of the human mind with the problem of existence. Would the American economy have collapsed if the casually educated caretakers of our treasure and good name who wasted our wealth on the assumption that greed is self-regulating had read those great conservative skeptics of human nature, Gibbon, Hobbes, Smith, and Burke, or studied the wisdom of our country’s founders? Mr. Madoff’s clients would not be out a penny today had they read Little Dorritt and encountered there Dickens’ ruinous and ruined Mr. Merdle (pun intended), Bernie’s exact prototype. The backlist—of which we as publishers, along with scholars, librarians and teachers are the guardians—is truly a matter of life and death.

By the mid 1970s the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers. Soon people shopped in deconstructed department stores, their former departments now individual specialty shops, where bookstores paid the same rent for the same limited space as the shoe store next door and needed the same quick turnover of inventories that sold themselves: books by celebrities and branded bestselling authors. By the eighties, publishers’ backlists were in steep decline as thousands of titles disappeared, dumped into the huge so-called orphanage of titles, no longer in print but still in copyright, whose owners can no longer be identified.

The steep decline in publishers’ backlists turned the industry upside down. Now publishers were obliged to pursue seasonal ephemera for which agents, putting their commercially viable titles up for auction, exacted unrealistic guarantees such as this seasons’ multimillion dollar guarantee to the multibillionaire Warren Buffett with his ready access to television, his folksy manner, and his hollow memoir—his true but neglected subject being greed, which has not lived up to expectations. Such disappointments are now commonplace and devastating. Publishers having lost control of their industry to commercially attractive authors and their agents are now not only their unhappy servants, but servants obliged to pay their masters for the privilege of serving them: an absurd and untenable situation.

Read the rest of the article.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun's strategy is to document and promote change in contemporary Indigenous history through large scale acrylic on canvas pieces with brush and/or a palette knife. He makes use of vivid colours and his work presents a positive aesthetic impression as well as expression of content that is often bi-cultural. In his work Yuxweluptun uses Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements, and the Western landscape tradition. His painted works explore political, environmental, and cultural issues. His personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Yuxweluptun's work has been included in numerous international group and solo exhibitions, such as INDIGENA: Contemporary Native Perspectives in 1992. He was the recipient of the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) award in 1998.

Much of the content of his work is derived from contemporary Native social and political issues. His father at one time was President of the North American Indian Brotherhood and his mother was Executive Director of the Indian Homemakers Association.

JPG Magazine: R.I.P/Free back issues.

jpg magazine logoJPG Magazine is / was an awesome photography magazine, published six times a year by 8020 Media. With a strong community of nearly 200,000 photographers who share their photos and stories online, review the work of others, and help make the magazine by voting for their favorite photos. Now hit by the economic recession, jpgmag.com will shut down.

"We've spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we've reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren't able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success."

Like another amazing arts magazine (The Drama) which has fallen due to the grueling magazine business, JPG has provided access to download free archives as pdf of previous JPG magazine back issues, outtakes, and photo challenge selections. I downloaded some JPG Mag issues and the photograph collections are truly amazing.

Checkout more JPG goodness at the Unofficial JPG Magazine group on Flickr.

Randy Laybourne - 20x20 Series & Show

Randy Laybourne has an upcoming show entitled 20x20, which is a series of 20 water color paintings done at 20"x20". Here is a time lapse video of Randy creating #16.

Here is a posting from Laybourne's blog describing his influences for the 20x20 show. When I was 20 years old I was able to backpack and skateboard around Europe, going as far east as the middle of Turkey and as far north at Gdansk in Poland. During the trip I tried to get to every gallery and museum I could afford to see. Being able to see a lot of the masterpieces of art was amazing but there were particular artists that had a big impact.

Bosch was one of them. Being able to see “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in Madrid was mindblowing. I stood there for what seemed hours. Trying to take in all the detail. Most other artwork in any museum I’d count to 10 and move on. Picasso 10, 9, 8… David 10, 9, and so on and on and on. Not with Bosch though.

Garden of Earth Delights (center panel)

Garden of Earth Delights (center panel)

Garden of Earthly Delights (center panel detail)

Garden of Earthly Delights (center panel detail)

Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel)

Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel)

Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel detail)

Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel detail)

I mainly was and am interested in his way of creating different visions of heaven, earth and hell. All his little demons and monsters are fascinating and there is so much to look for and read into.

Pieter Brugel was equally impressive to me. The influence of Bosch on Brugel is clear but Brugel goes a different route and along with vision of hell, he shows what life was like in a village. Full of entertaining details and stories.

bruegel_01

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Netherlandish Proverbs

Netherlandish Proverbs

Netherlandish Proverbs info

Netherlandish Proverbs info

The Netherlandish Proverbs illustrated sayings of his day visually and every little thing had a meaning. Wikipedia shows them all. So am still so amazed with all of it.

The Triumph of Death

The Triumph of Death

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

The amount of little things that have to do with a story or meaning is what drew me in then and what still makes me go over the work of both artists.

With the 20X20 work, they didn’t start off with tons of detail but as I kept going and finishing one after another, some similar, quiet narratives were coming to life. There are a few things from my life directly in the work, but I’d much rather have the viewer find little meanings on their own. As I kept going with the series, they were getting more and more complicated and taking a bit longer to do. I kept going back to review the works of Bosch and Bruegel as the series was being done. I’m glad I was able to see their actual work (way back in the 90s) and have it make its mark on my own in some simple way.

Swoon's Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea

In the early evening on Sunday, September 7th, seven hand made boats, or more precisely, seven floating sculptures by Swoon,  docked in front of Deitch Studios on the East River in Long Island City. Their arrival at Deitch Studios was the final stop on a three-week journey down the Hudson River and around the tip of Manhattan. The seven boats, built by Swoon and her friends from scrap wood and other discarded materials, begin their sail down the Hudson River on August 15th in Troy, New York, stopping along the way for musical and theatrical performances. Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea is a two-part exhibition merging Swoon’s recent portraits, found objects of urban decay and a floating sculptural city. One part of the exhibition is on the water. The other is in the gallery. As the seven boats dock in front of Deitch Studios, they will be tethered by ropes to the skirts of a twenty-five foot high paper sculpture of two sisters embracing, the central image of the indoor portion of the show. The image of the Switchback Sisters came to Swoon in a dream when she was worried about the rising waters when her first set of boats was floating down the Mississippi River two years ago. She envisioned a woman who would gather the boats into a safe haven under her skirts.

Swoon’s indoor installation, in the large cathedral like space of Deitch Studios, is divided into two levels, above and below an imaginary flood line. She imagines that if the water of the East River were to rise, her boats could float into the shelter of the gallery space. The imagery on the walls is drawn from the sea and from the mangrove swamps that the artist explored in her Florida youth. She is inspired by the way the trees in the mangrove swamps send out huge networks of roots, both below and above the water, creating two parallel ecosystems. Above the imaginary waterline, Swoon has created the image of a city rising from the sea. The parallel narratives of the exhibition represent a convergence of her life on the river and her life as a street artist in New York City.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea is the result of a year of design and construction and the combined efforts of seventy- five collaborators, working under Swoon’s direction. A crew of forty people will sail the seven boats down the Hudson. During the summer of 2006, Swoon and the Miss Rockaway Armada launched a similar project on the Mississippi River. For this year’s project, Swoon designed and supervised the construction of all the boats herself and will culminate the journey with an ambitious exhibition of her large wooden and paper constructions and her large-scale prints.

Swoon celebrates with a bottle of champagne

Swoon is recognized as one of the most original street artists to emerge in New York during the past decade. Her imagery is both bold and intricate, a unique fusion of figurative and architectural elements. She creates portraits of people who she meets on her travels and inserts them into architectural settings both on the street and more recently in galleries. In her gallery installations, Swoon is able to build her own artistic world, inventing a landscape that intersects with urban decay. Inspired by German Expressionist prints, Indonesian shadow puppets, and dense Asian cityscapes, she uses cut paper to create conceptual explorations of the urban street.

Swoon’s collaborators on Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea include playwright Lisa D’Amour, circus composer Sxip Shirey, Kinetic Steam Works from San Francisco and the band Dark Dark Dark. Performances will take place as the boats dock during their journey down the Hudson River in August and in front of Deitch Studios during the second week of September.

Please see the website www.switchbacksea.org for tour dates and additional information.

Banksy: The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

Banksy (the only "superstar" artist that I know that has continued to live up to the hype) has recently designed a pet shop that includes fish sticks swimming in a fish tank, a chimpanzee watching chimp porn, sleeping leopard that turns out to be a fur coat, chicken McNuggets sipping barbeque sauce and hot dog hamsters. The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill is less than 300 square feet and can't hold more than 20 people at any one time. The inspiration for the show came when Banksy witnessed a chihuahua with a diamond collar being walked passed a homeless person. He wanted to bring forth the question why do we spoil some animals and murder others.

More images from Banksy's Village Petstore show.

Banksy recently put up three giant billboards in the Big Apple. All depicting the NYC mascot, one rat sports an "I heart New York" shirt at the corner of Grand and Wooster, another is found whitewashing the wall at Houston and Macdougal and the last rat at Howard and Broadway is holding a briefcase full of money accompanied with text that reads "Let them eat crack." In a statement Bansky comments, "I wanted to play the corporations at their own game, at the same scale and in the same locations. The advantage of billboard companies is that they'll let you write anything for money, even if what you write is questioning the ethics of letting someone write anything because they have money."

Amy Stein - Domesticated

Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. Amy crafts photographic allegories set simultaneously in a number of different liminal spaces. Her sure and realistic color works manifest the place where the human-built meets the wild, but in addition they show us where the factual descriptive image meets fiction. Despite their apparent realism, her images are posed and constructed, sometimes using models and taxidermy props, sometimes using the bodies of dead or living animals to re-create, record and perform actual events that occurred in the small Pennsylvania town of Matamoras, which Stein has claimed as surely as Faulkner invented and limned Yoknapatawpha County. What at first appears to be a series of photojournalistic decisive moments is revealed, at a second look, to be a powerfully imagined vision that establishes its strength through its very artificiality.

Stein has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA and the West Collection. In 2006, Stein was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery-Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. A monograph of Domesticated will be published in fall 2008. This forthcoming book won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival. Amy is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and Pool Gallery in Berlin.

© Amy Stein - Cover image from the book "Domesticated"

Read an interview with Amy Stein on FeatureShoot.com

 
 
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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.