PLEASE JOIN ARCANA: BOOKS ON THE ARTS + LA>< ART FOR A BOOK SIGNING AND RECEPTION FOR

MUNGO THOMSON AND MICHAEL WEBSTER'S  C R I C K E T S
Published by LA><ART, Christoph Keller Editions, and JRP | Ringier
 

The artist's book Crickets is the musical score for Mungo Thomson's artwork Crickets. For it, the artist acquired the rights to a compilation of field recordings of crickets made in France, Cameroon, Senegal, Martinique, Borneo, Thailand, and Venezuela between the late 1960s and late 1990s. These recordings became the basis for an original score. The result is a dynamic composition that moves around a company of musicians and offers different instrumentation as the locations and species in the recordings change from track to track. Crickets was performed at the Ball of Artists in 2012 and on the High Line in New York City on in 2013.

In addition to the first available copies of Crickets, Mungo Thomson's signed, blind-debossed, letterpress print Crickets score experimental cluster track 14 limited to five copies published by LA><ART Editions will be available for sale at the event. The image features several measures of music developed for violins to play “atmosphere” on Crickets. We will also have copies of Mungo Thomson's recent hardbound Site Santa Fe catalogue Time People Money Crickets.

 

MEET US AT THE FAIR!
 

Printed Matter's LA ART BOOK FAIR
 

Free to the public at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA
  

PERRY ELLIS: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
with PHOTOGRAPHER ERICA LENNARD
AND SPECIAL GUESTS!
 

THE RHINO RECORDS STORY: REVENGE OF THE MUSIC NERDS  BY HAROLD BRONSON
 

ALEXANDER McQUEEN: WORKING PROCESS - PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK WAPLINGTON

In 2008 Alexander McQueen commissioned photographer Nick Waplington to document the creation of his Fall 2009 collection - all the way from inception to runway showing. Unfortunately, it was to be the last Fall / Winter collection that McQueen would stage before his untimely death. This show, which he titled The Horn of Plenty, found McQueen revisiting his fifteen-year archive of work and recycling it into a new collection. In effect, it was his personal survey of his work to date. The set was composed of broken mirrors and a giant trash heap made up of all the sets from his previous shows. Critics have commented that this reflected McQueen’s feelings towards the fashion system and how it pressures designers to be creative geniuses while relegating each collection to the garbage bin of history as soon as it’s sold. Waplington was given unprecedented access to McQueen and his staff, which included the current Creative Director of the brand, Sarah Burton. Every step of the creative process is documented in fascinating detail, and readers receive a rare insight into the inner workings of McQueen’s creative process. Most notably, McQueen himself conceived the book’s layout, sequencing each picture on storyboards. The book was ready for publication when McQueen died, then was put on hold - until now. This substantial overview, with more than one hundred and twenty photographs, is published just as McQueen edited it, commemorating the most personal of his collections. It includes an essay by Susannah Frankel, Fashion Editor at Grazia (U.K.).

Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), CBE, was one of the most important fashion designers of the last two decades. He was the recipient of four British Designer of the Year awards, as well as the CFDA’s International Designer of the Year award, 2003. In 2011, following his death, the Costume Institute in New York organized an enormously successful retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artist and photographer Nick Waplington (born 1970) has published several books including Living Room and The Wedding (Aperture), Safety in Numbers (Booth Clibborn) and Truth of Consequence (Phaidon). He lives in London and New York.

 

PLEASE JOIN US THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26th, 6:30 - 8:00 PM AT FOR A PUBLICATION PARTY FOR
RICKY SWALLOW:BRONZES

Ricky Swallow is known for intricately and attentively crafted sculptural works, often combining contemporary imagery with art historical references, and the traditional notion of nature morte. His current bronze works extend this practice while reflecting the more recent influences of twentieth century design, studio ceramics and the inventiveness of folk art.

This lovely new hardbound co-edition from Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney surveys the artist's ongoing body of bronze sculpture made since 2010, and features an essay by Michael Ned Holte, photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, and is Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life.

SAM LUBELL + GREG GOLDIN: NEVER BUILT LOS ANGELES

Never Built Los Angeles, published by Metropolis Books, explores the “what if” Los Angeles, investigating the values and untapped potential of a city still in search of itself. A treasure trove of buildings, master plans, parks, follies and mass-transit proposals that only saw the drawing board, the book asks: why is Los Angeles a mecca for great architects, yet so lacking in urban innovation? Featured are more than 100 visionary works that could have transformed both the physical reality and the collective perception of the metropolis, from Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew’s groundbreaking 1930 Plan for the Los Angeles Region, which would have increased the amount of green space in the notoriously park-poor city fivefold; to John Lautner’s Alto Capistrano, a series of spaceship-like apartments hovering above a mixed-use development; to Jean Nouvel’s 2008 Green Blade, a condominium tower clad entirely in cascading plants. Through text and more than 400 color and black-and-white illustrations drawn from archives around the U.S., authors Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin explore the visceral (and sometimes misleading) power of architectural ideas conveyed through sketches, renderings, blueprints, models and the now waning art of hand drawing. Many of these schemes--promoting a denser, more vibrant city--are still relevant today and could inspire future designs. Never Built Los Angeles will set the stage for a renewed interest in visionary projects in this, one of the world’s great cities.

 

PAZ DE LA HUERTA: THE BIRDS DIDN'T DIE OVER THE WINTER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEXANDRA CARR
 

Photographer Alexandra Carr met Paz de la Huerta - the actress and Boardwalk Empire star - in New York in 2007, shortly before Paz became the celebrity she is today, and they soon agreed to collaborate on a photo project. The two began shooting in the fall of 2008, often using Paz’s small West Village apartment as a backdrop - which was mercifully well heated throughout that especially cold New York winter. Published by Damiani Editore, and with an introduction by Francesco Clemente, The Birds Didn’t Die Over the Winter is a gorgeous, linen-bound volume that explores themes of love, loneliness and the difficult transition from youth into relative maturity. As Carr recalls, “it was made during a turbulent time in Paz’s life and her life is a subtext in an otherwise imagined reality. We would discuss a character and direction beforehand and then Paz would play out these roles partly of made up characters and of favorite scenes from films each shoot.” Paz is a charismatic subject throughout the book, at once fearless, sexual and vividly present, moving fluidly between roleplay and apparent candor. Carr explains the title: “[Paz] called one morning in the spring saying she had an idea for what we should call the book. She said she woke up and heard birds outside her window. She couldn’t believe they had survived such an abominable winter. It was a perfect metaphor for the book.”

See images from this event here.

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA:  WORKING METHODS / MÉTODOS DE TRABAJO

WITH AUTHOR MARY RAKOW, CURATOR HOWARD N. FOX AND THE ARTIST
 

In the first comprehensive study of Martínez Celaya’s multifaceted process, authors Mary Rakow and Matthew Biro illuminate previously unaddressed aspects of the artist’s practice including his materials and his approach towards them, literary influences, tendency to destroy his own work, and the changes that led to pivotal moments in his career. Working Methods is a lovely hardbound monograph that features new photography, archival images, and a number of previously unpublished works. Also included are an interview by Rakow with the artist that reveals his unique practice as well as a biographical chronology, bibliography, and exhibition history. Enrique Martínez Celaya is one of the most intriguing and celebrated artists to emerge from the United States in recent years. Trained as artist and physicist, his practice embraces painting, sculpture, photography, and writing. His projects frequently take the form of multidisciplinary environments that balance images with the immediacy of the material experience, and his ideas as well as his approach are influenced by sources that range from Nordic poetry to quantum physics. His early training as a scientist and his interest in philosophy is evident in his layered work which is cerebral, emotionally direct, and deeply connected to life.

 

Redheaded Peckerwood is a work with a tragic underlying narrative – the story of 19 year old Charles Starkweather and 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate who murdered ten people, including Fugate’s family, during a three day killing spree across Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The images record places and things central to the story, depict ideas inspired by it, and capture other moments and discoveries along the way.

From a technical perspective, the photographs incorporate and reference the techniques of photojournalism, forensic photography, image appropriation, reenactment and documentary landscape photography. On a conceptual level, they deal with a charged landscape and play with a photographic representation and truth as the work deconstructs a pre-existing narrative. Redheaded Peckerwood also utilizes and plays with a pre-existing archive of material, deliberately mixing fact and fiction, past and present, myth and reality as it presents, expands and re-presents the various facts and theories surrounding this story.

While photographs are the heart of this work, they are the complemented and informed by documents and objects that belonged to the killers and their victims – including a map, poem, confession letter, stuffed animal, hood ornament and various other items, in several cases, these materials are discoveries first made by the artist and presented here for the first time.

In book form, the work is presented as a sort of visual crime dossier, including pieces of paper which are inserted into the book. The many individual pieces included serve as cues and clues within the visual puzzle. In this way, there are connections that are left for the viewer to be made and mysteries that are left to be solved.
 

Christian Patterson's Redheaded Peckerwood has gained near-iconic status amongst the photography books of the past few years. Published by MACK in 2011, it sold out almost immediately, and was included on too many year end best-of lists to count. It is once again available, and we are so pleased that Mr. Patterson will be here signing copies on Thursday in conjunction with his exhibition of the work opening at Rose Gallery in Bergamot Station on the 29th.