To the casual viewer, books and prints may seem a most conventional of pairings. After all, for four hundred years we have thought of books as being printed and prints as being a natural complement to books. Illustrated books may come to mind, commercially published, fairly uniform in size, in which there is a clear and explicit relationship between text and image.
The work in this show, however, draws on a slightly different tradition, one that also goes back hundreds of years but has been in a resurgence for the last thirty years or so. The artist’s book as an art form uses the structure, rhythm, flow and context of the book as an artistic medium in its own right. The book itself is an integral part of the piece of art, not simply a container for it.

Among printers there is a long and venerable tradition of limited edition books; great care and aesthetic concern is given to the overall look and feel of the book. Collaboration becomes the key, between printer, artist, writer, designer. The artists exhibited here are both printers in that they are producing these books and printmakers in that they are visual artists who happen to work in the medium of print. These overlapping identities — printer, printmaker, artist, bookartist — help to account for the wide range of styles and references to the book structure itself that is demonstrated here. This diversity is also indicative of bookarts in general, so this show of books specifically by printmakers gives a good feeling for the medium of bookarts as a whole.

Within this range of diversity, Brian Cohen’s What the Animals Teach Us represents what we might think of as a traditional format: image and text are visually separated, the text is typeset, and the printed images clearly refer to the text. On the other end of the spectrum, the tactile handmade pages of Amy Eva Raehse’s ill Formed (sic) evoke a feeling or sensation that is enhanced but not explicitly stated by the minimal printed forms. Raehse’s work (as well as Charles Cave’s Kinky, Raunchy, Nasty, Wet, Guns and Eleanor Rubin’s loosely structured Dream Made Visible,) is reminiscent of the Fluxus movement of the ‘60s that challenged and expanded concepts of both "book" and "art."

The greater part of the work shown here falls between these extremes and uses traditional book genres as a point of departure. In David Thomas’ Ho Chi Minh, the book becomes a lacquer box that serves as the structure for biographical narrative; Tanja Softic’s Book of Mourning evokes rituals of life and loss; Sam Walker and John Carrera’s Putrefatti conveys both time and tenuousness of scientific order and inquiry; Karen Kunc’s Truly Bone visually complements the color and cadence of Hilda Raz’s poetry. While the variety within artists’ books is vast, the prevailing commonality is that the book as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it becomes a talisman of experience.

While a large number of the books here use text, there is typically a visual dance between word and image. Image and text are superimposed, played against each other, and allowed to enhance and broaden the overall meaning of the piece rather than narrowing the viewer/reader’s response. In D.B. Dowd’s Meet Me in Kuwait, the text serves as a critical reflection on the visual narrative. Charles Hobson’s Shipwreck Stories elegantly layers historical maps, images of shipwrecks, mylar drawings and handwritten accounts to convey levels of experience and knowledge. In John Ross’ Metropolis the text takes on monumental scale, competing with the architectural images. Similarly, Alex Gerasev’s Story of Creation integrates cyrillic characters right into the relief images that they accompany.
The printed page alone, however, does not convey the full impact of these artists’ books. The structure of the book itself — its binding, cover, casing, endpapers — is a dominant part of the aesthetic of each work. From the coptic binding of A.C. Cotty’s Grid Modulation to the fragile organic cover of Su Li Hung’s Book of Spider Web, considerable care has been taken to integrate structure and concept.
The Boston Printmakers would like to extend a special word of thanks to Anne Anninger, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, for taking the time and effort to jury this fine selection of work by our call. We hope you will enjoy the
exhibition as well.

Sam Walker
President, The Boston Printmakers

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Sam Walker