Press & Release 2016: Technology and the Evolution of the Artist’s Book’

Exhibition Archive

Review by David Lillington for The Blue Notebook Journal, The Centre for Fine Art Research

Review by Peter Seddon for The Artist’s Book Yearbook

Press & Release 2016 is the Winner of the Brighton Fringe Festival’s 2016 Best Exhibition Award!

Guest Curator Maddy Rosenberg takes us through the exhibition:

The team talk about how the exhibition was created: 

In the Main Gallery

30 April – 12 June 2016
Weds – Sun,  11am – 5pm

A visionary exhibition of hand-made artist’s books presented within a specially designed and immersive gallery environment.

Building upon Phoenix Brighton’s reputation for presenting unique and highly acclaimed exhibitions of artists’ books, we present an ambitious new project that brings together one of the world’s foremost artist books curators and a  Brighton-based design team. 

The exhibition features the work of notable book artists from across the world, selected by New York based curator and artist Maddy Rosenberg. Focusing on hand-made, exquisitely crafted, sculptural objects and installations, the work will be brought together within a theatrical display created by exhibition designers Curious Space. Visitors will experience a dramatic re-invention of the gallery as a place in which they can encounter the artist’s book in a direct and imaginative way.

Rosenberg has selected the work of over twenty international artists, featuring: Liberatura (Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer), Marianne R. Petit, and Jay Bolotin, plus work by: Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine, Emma Hill Fine Art, Tina Flau, Art Hazelwood, Valerie Huhn, Katherine Jackson, Kahn + Selesnick, Eunkang Koh, Despo Magoni, Max Marek, Heidi Neilson, Geraldine Ondrizek, Marianne R. Petit, Maddy Rosenberg, Susan Rostow, Buzz Spector, Sarah Stengle, Mary Ting, and a selection from the Book Art Museum in Lodz, Poland.

Curator’statement: “If we return to the early days of humans, arguably the first books, visual passages of communication, are image-based text. The cave paintings are an overlay narrative of life over centuries; the temples of Egypt are slabs of chiseled stone in image with text, text as image; Chinese scrolls unroll with brush line and value, building landscapes of a story; a Mayan codex is a folded accordion unbound paper book. The image and the text, combined with structure, has always been integral to the book, unknowing collaborations among artists, artisans and scribes. The invention of the printing press, a simple mechanical technology allowing us to disseminate information quicker to a mass audience with the advent of public education, may have become a tool in the positive development in the spreading of knowledge. However, we slowly began to forget about the artistry of the book and reduced it to a mere bound container of written information, occasionally “illustrated.” In the West, the line lost its visual magic and it became just a letter to spell a word.

 But to the artist, ever experimenting with the visual and textual meaning, the separation never quite processed. Others may not have looked upon their work as a book because the form was not yet recognized as such, but the work was meant to be read in the most basic meaning of the word. This is an exhibition of contemporary artists who work with the book as an art form, whether it be the word in search of the visual or the visual seeking the word or a balancing act between the two, these international artists incorporate old and new technology, materials that may or may not include paper, and for that matter, may or may not include printing, sometimes searching back in history for technologies even simpler than the printing press.”

Press & Release 2016 is the third in a series of international artist book exhibitions developed by Karin Mori (programme curator/project manager) and Ben Thomson (design and construction) for Phoenix Brighton.