Collaboration is...

I've been working on an article for the upcoming issue of The California Printmaker. The issue has a focus on collaboration, and I'm writing about Book Bombs!

Collaboration is such an important part of my work. Not only have I collaborated with Mary, I also have collaborated several times with Marie Elcin, and am currently working on a collaborative project with Anne Beck. And I can't forget my recent collaboration with Robert! The image above is from one of Anne's and my tests. In fact, one of the first artist books I ever made, which convinced me what I really wanted to do was make books, was a collaboration between sixteen artists.

As I was writing about Book Bombs, I was trying to capture the essence of what a collaboration really is. It's more than just working with others to make art in some way. As I was brainstorming, I ended up with the following list, which I decided to share here.

Collaboration is working together
Collaboration is an environment for growth
Collaboration is a loss of ego
Collaboration is exciting
Collaboration is a form of evolution
Collaboration is learning to listen
Collaboration is embracing the process
Collaboration is opening up
Collaboration is new insights
Collaboration is unexpected turns
Collaboration is a form of giving
Collaboration is a form of receiving
Collaboration is a form of gratitude
Collaboration is an act of love

Un/Natural Occurances at Central Booking (and other stuff!)

Chacaltaya is part of this exhibition opening this week at Central Booking, now at its new location on the Lower East Side! The press release can be read here, and a catalog of the exhibition can be purchased here.

Book Bombs will also be part of the citywide exhibition Intertext in St. Louis this October. And Carbon Corpus is going to be part of the OFFspace exhibition Brave New World, at the Spare Change Artist Space.

All in all, going to be a busy fall.

Wyoming Dispatch: By Hand

I've been steadily working on a print that is going to take the form of a triptych - three blocks printed on three separate pieces of paper, one continuous image. Below, Blanche calendars the paper.

Each block has selective inking, so that in one round of printing I am printing two colors. The image is inspired by the wintery landscape and its colors here - a minimal palette, only shades of gray, blue, black.

The block will be reduced for another layer of color. Below are the results of the first round of printing. The paper is a handmade rag paper (made from the leftover pulp from this piece). Normally, (white) paper is the negative space, the empty space of an image. Here I hoped the light blue of the fibers would activate the positive space of the image.

 

I printed it with a wooden spoon. Originally, I started to print them on Blanche, but she seemed inclined to rip the linoleum, and after all the carving I decided spoon prints were the way to go.

While I was spooning the backs of the prints, I found myself thinking of how this piece is the result of my hands in so many ways. With the exception of using Blanche to calendar the paper,  I made the paper by hand from rags I cut up, by hand. I carved the blocks by hand. I inked them by hand. And I printed them with nothing more than a wooden spoon and the pressure applied by my arms, wrists, and hands. I even tried the old trick of rubbing the spoon on my cheek to get a small amount of oil to make rubbing smoother, but everything is so very dry here that I don't think my cheek could contribute.

Hand-printing on your own handmade paper is a rather intimate experience. Don't get me wrong, I love a press. But while hand printing I'm able to feel how the paper becomes burnished, the punch of the relief into the fibers, the suction of the ink, the entire romance of the process. I feel like this piece will have a dual narrative, that which is presented in the image (more on that to come!), and that of its creation with my hands, here in a Wyoming winter.

 As I was working on the center print, we were hit with another snowstorm. The image above is looking from the residence to the studio buildings - the writers are the log cabin on the right, we visual artists are working in the one on the left. 

In other news - today I learned that Book Bombs is part of the exhibition For Decoration and Agitation, An Exhibition of Stencil and Pochoir Books and Art, curated by our kickass friend Jared Ash, at the Newark Public Library! East Coast friends, I hope some of you get a chance to check it out.

November 2011 Update

With November's arrival, I'm on the verge of leaving for Wyoming for a month at the Jentel Arts Residency Program. I'm still kind of in shock that it's really happening. I'm hoping to spend a month making prints, as it has been a while since I just made prints without them being part of some greater, more complicated project. Though I'm sure I'll find a way to make things more complicated when I get there.

In other news, I was recently invited to write a piece for Felt and Wire on my papermaking practice. I'm also looking forward to being part of two parallel exhibitions this winter after my return from Wyoming, one at SOMArts and one at the San Francisco Center for the Book, both curated by Hanna Regrev and focusing on artists responding to the work of John Cage.

Book Bombs has also released it's sixth zine, Horizontalidad, available in both print and PDF versions. This zine is a response to the Occupy movement, and the print version was printed at both the Crane Paper Factory and Melanie Mowinski's Press: Letterpress As A Public Art Project, both in Massachusetts. Out of all our zines so far, I'm proudest of this one. Not just because it's our most recent, but because I felt that we tied our concept into a larger, greater whole, speaking to the moment of now, but tying it to other movements and philosophies.

Finally, I'm still selling this piece on Etsy to raise funds for Robert's parents to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Irene. The print has been purchased by the Special Collections of the Newark Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia, as well as a few individuals, but there are still some left!

2011 so far...

The image above is a preview of one of my two newest artist books, Fossil Fuels. It is a unique artist book made up of relief prints, intaglios, collographs, digital prints, and hand embroidery. Fossil Fuels, and another artist book, Coal Burning, will be debuted at the Third Biennial Codex International Book Fair, at the Central Booking booth. I will also have an assortment of some of my older books.

In related news, I am currently part of The Book, A Contemporary View, at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington, DE, and will be part of an upcoming exhibition, Battle of the Sexes, at the Delaware Art Museum, also in Wilmington.

The Book Bombs collaboration continues, with a recent print bombing of San Francisco. We are also currently part of the exhibition Social Commentaries at the Catich Gallery at Saint Ambroise University in Davenport, IO. In February, we will be releasing our newest zine, The Ethics of Wheatpaste, for the first time as both hard copy and a free, downloadable pdf, as part of the Refugee Reading Room project of Amze Emmons. More on this to come. . . .

So if you are in the Bay Area for Codex, please stop by the Central Booking booth and say hello! And if you haven't yet - check out my new website!

Burned Books, Book Bombs, and other less alliterative news

This image is a preview of my next installation, Libros Perdidos, which will be part of the exhibition The Book, A Contemporary View, at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. The show runs from December 22, 2010 - April 17, 2011, later traveled from the DCCA in Wilmington, Delaware to Towson State University in Maryland.

The ongoing Book Bombs collaboration with Mary Tasillo has released Book Bombs Issue #2, We Walk Asking Questions. We will also be part of the upcoming exhibition Social Commentaries at the Catich Gallery at Saint Ambroise University, in Davenport, Iowa.

And finally, if you haven't checked it out yet - please visit my new website - michellewilsonprojects.com. To see images of my most recent completed installation, Reverse Archaeology, visit here. In addition to the work, you can catch a glimpse of the crazy-beautiful-unpredictable weather that we dealt with at the Life is Art Foundation in Santa Rose, CA. Thanks!

May Update

Much to report! My collaboration with Mary Tasillo - Book Bombs - will be taking part in many upcoming exhibitions. The first of which is Axis Alley 2010 - our installation Fibrile is currently on view in the alley behind 2212 North Calvert Street in Baltimore, MD. Everyone is welcome to join the Axis Alley stroll on May 23 (rain date May 22) to see the installations and enjoy food and drink B-more style.

Also coming in up in Baltimore, Book Bombs will have work at the Whole Gallery as part of their upcoming exhibition Sign Language. And later this summer we will be part of the exhibition Paper at the Lost Coast Culture Machine in Fort Bragg, CA.

April Update

My Book Bombs collaboration with Mary Tasillo continues to thrive - over the next few months we will be exhibition work from the project in Baltimore and in Fort Bragg, CA. We will also be part of the Axis Alley project, taking over the back of a house with wheatpasted demin paper. More to come....so stay tuned!

Book Bombs Zine Party

Please join me at my fellow Book Bomber Mary Tasillo this Friday at Nexus Foundation for Today's Art for the release of Rooted Within, Book Bombs Issue #1. The first two hundred or so people will receive a free copy!

Nexus is located at 1400 North American Street in the Crane Arts Building. Our event will last from 6-9 PM, and will be part of a series of Philagrafika 2010 Independent Projects holding receptions that evening in the Crane. To see the list of other events, please visit here. It's free and open for everyone, I hope to see some of you there!

2010 News: Book Bombs and other exhibitions

Due to a packed fall schedule, I'm a bit behind on this blog. A series of updates is due. Most excitingly is:

BOOK BOMBS

Book Bombs, my collaborative project with Mary Tasillo for Philagrafika 2010, has taken off. Our first bombing took place the first week of January, and another is coming up in the first week of February. To support this project, we have been awarded the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts Project Stream Grant. We have also been mentioned on WHYY and the Philadelphia City Paper. And next week, we have been invited to take over Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery's Window on Broad, located at 333 South Broad Street in Center City Philadelphia. For images of this project, please visit our blog.

OTHER EXHIBITIONS

Currently, I am participating in a few other exhibitions. Zoe Cohen, Art Program Manager for the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, selected the Migratory Books Project for the juried exhibition Nest and Branch. The exhibition runs to April 2, and you can read about it here.

From February 1-March 12 my work can be seen on the west coast as part of the Page Show at Chapman University's Guggenheim Gallery. Thanks to Rachelle Woo Chuang for inviting me to be a part of it! For anyone on the west coast, please feel welcome to come to the opening reception on February 2 from 5:30-9 PM. The Guggenheim Gallery is located in Moulten Center on Chapman University Campus in Orange, California.

Also in February I will also be part of the exhibition We and Stories, curated by Asa Yoshie, in the new Printmaking Gallery at the University of the Arts. Check back here for information on this soon!

OTHER NEWS

And finally, Issue #26 of the Journal of Artist Books is out, featuring The Hybrid Book Experiment, an article I co-authored with Amanda D'Amico of Tiny Revolutionary Press. Also in the issue see Democratic Organization, by my Book Bombs partner Mary Tasillo. Also check out the most recent issue of Bound and Lettered, which has another version of Democratic Organization by Mary T. Both articles mention the Migratory Books Project. Thanks Mary!

Scapegoat Services and other Exhibition Updates

This weekend, September 19, my performative installation MODERN DAY SCAPEGOAT SERVICES will take place at the X Initiative. It will take place from 3-6 PM. The X Initiative is located at 548 West 22nd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. MODERN DAY SCAPEGOAT SERVICES and the X Initiative are both free and open to the public.

In other news, BOOK BOMBS, the project I am collaborating on with Mary Tasillo, has been selected for the Welcome House Project. We will be inhabiting the space on October 9, where will be inviting passers-by to make paper and turn the inside of the House into a daylong community installation about Love Park.

I also will be participating in two upcoming exhibitions - Paperworks, in Art in City Hall, on display from October 1 - January 1, 2010, with an opening reception on October 8th from 5-7 PM, and Bodies in Motion, A Running Commentary, an exhibition of works and a fundraiser for the Girls Gotta Run Foundation at the Holy Family University Gallery, from October 1-30, with an opening reception on October 7 from 6-8 PM.