The Peninsula Museum of Art presents Books Against the Wall, an exhibition of Bay Area book artists who translate their work to mixed media and multimedia projects. These artists use the book format to make original works of art and then explore how to share what they have made with a larger audience. The results challenge the viewer to consider the book as sculpture, animation video game and more. Some pieces share the process used in creating the images, others expand an original concept by presenting it in a new format. The show broadens and enhances our notions of what a book can be.
Books Against the Wall includes work by five artists:
Zach Clark creates work concerned with locational memory and his own changing relationship to nature. Working in various approaches to publishing, Zach translates analog photography and writing through risograph, screenprinting, and letterpress into broadsides, postcards, booklets, and hand bound books. Brilliant Silence serves as the culminating work in the last six years of his practice, while Deciduous and Tourist Photographs exist as a prologue and epilogue to the series, with various other forms of ephemera filling the in between, including However Strange The Landscape, an accordion booklet published by Buffalo, NY printmaker Rachel Shelton using Zach’s images, reflecting his own collaborative publishing practice.
Sarah Klein puts paper to motion by presenting books, prints and animations. Informed by a decade of working with stop-motion animation she uses repetition and variation to activate her subject material. To this effect her work employs or suggests movement. The image sequences are arranged for the viewer to set them into motion with a GIF app on a smart device or the mind’s eye.
Mary V. Marsh makes prints and artist's books that explore the changing technologies of communication through a lens of personal experience and anxiety. Presented here are TABLOID!, a linoleum-cut tabloid newspaper sourcing recent headlines, Vertical Scroll: Unorientable, a large newspaper-like möbius strip, referencing the endless scrolling of digital reading, and Here & Now, hanging book pages featuring linoleum-cuts and rubbings that evoke a sense of being in two realities at the same time when immersed in reading a book.
Andy Rottner Andy Rottner is an artist, bookbinder and fine-art publisher. His two books presented here; Smoke Pourin' Out of a Boxcar Door & Talkin' Hard Work translate folk music into drawing and book form.
Lorna Stevens is a mixed media artist whose work centers on integrating material and technique to represent subject matter. She presents Paradise Drive, an entirely handmade book of sonnets and paintings translated to video, electronic game, exhibition, print, and e-book.
Zach Clark, Brilliant Silence, 2022. Risograph & Letterpress artist book. 8x8"
Mary Marsh, Vertical Scroll: Unorientable, Linoleum cut on Kitakata, dimensions variable, about 6’ x 3’ x 15”
Sarah Klein, Orbitals, 2020, Paper. Softcover. Staple binding. Eight pages. 8" x 6"
Andy Rottner, Talkin' Hard Work, 2015, hand drawn on Hahnemuhle Bugra and bound in distressed buckram, 8w" x 12h" x 1d" (closed size in clamshell box) 16w" x 12h" x 1d" (open book size)
Lorna Stevens, Paradise Drive, 2020, handmade book with ink and watercolor on Saunders Waterford, 9 x 8.5 x .75"