Date

2020

Media

Collage, Marbling, Offset-Lithography, Rubbing, Suminagashi

Binding

Modified Tapes binding with leather spine

Dimensions

16 × 9 × 1 in

Pages

23

Location

Brooklyn, NY

Publisher

Organik

Paper

Non-alpha cotton, offset-litho printed vintage nautical maps

$ 6,800.00

Unavailable


View Collectors

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art

This book is the sister of Everything Is Only For A Day.

Organik is honored to be have collaborated with self-proclaimed, decolonial, hydro-feminist*’ sTo Len on these two lyrical and lurid accountings of various confluences, including psycho-marine-cartography, the age of Covid 19, and the collision of re-imagining/imaging of micro and macro-biology. Over 6 years in the making, these books travel through space and time, paralleling the superfluidity of their subject matter. Organik codexical maestro Christopher Wilde mashed-up and cut-up various vintage nautical maps of the 1980s and ’90s and bound them in a hard case. The Organik team then did a layer of rubbings** from various surfaces in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and the Angelus Rosendale cemetery (one of the oldest multi-denominational/multi-cultural cemeteries in California). The books were then delivered to Len who lovingly and generously applied his unique alchemical variety of Suminagashi marbling to each map creating a new universe of ocean-based geographies with a micro-biological overlay. The books were then finished by Allerslev and Weber with a literary collage of text wax-rubbed from the bronze plaques of Library Way on 41st Street in Manhattan, featuring writing by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Gu Cheng, Virginia Woolf, and a poignant and pertinent quote from Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’.

The paper is non-alpha cotton offset-lithography printed nautical maps with a leather spine.

“A sobering, yet optimistic visual, aesthetic rollercoaster ride, plunging the reader into an intimate microscopic seascape of contagions and then raising them to a dizzying global perspective of geography-altering climate change. These recent collaborations from the Organik art group are a sobering yet optimistic guide to intersectional, multi-universal, turbulence. Plague Chronicle‘s and Everything Is Only For A Day‘s dramatic texturing doesn’t so much as jump up at the reader as pull the reader deep down into the infinite abyss of its pages.  sTo Len’s participation in the Organik group was a long time coming, and the collaboration is fluid and fruitful.” — Karen Eliot, Artists’ Books Quarterly, June. 2021

* Hydro-feminism is a concept developed by theorist and educator Astrida Neimanis.

** Rubbing (AKA frottage), is a form of vigorous mono-printing that uses elements from the entire world as its matrices, it has origins in ancient China as one of the first printing practices.