Mechanical Brides - Consortium Editions

- ANGELS IN THE ANGLES -

AN EXHIBITION OF CONCRETE POETRY

exhibition opens Oct 9, 7pm, 602 E.Hastings Vancouver CA

GALLERY ATSUI - 2009 OCTOBER

SCREENPRINT EDITIONS - view slideshow

DONATO MANCINI, CHRISTIAN BÖK, MARINA ROY

DONATO MANCINI

" Æthel " - 2009

Donato Mancini is the author two books of procedural and visual poetry, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007), both from New Star books, both nominated for the ReLit Award. He also co-directed the world's first genuine in-world avatar documentary AVATARA (2003). Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver BC, he was a principal organiser of the N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. He is now finishing a third collection of visual and textworks for New Star and beginning to prepare for publication his book-length study of the ideology and ideolects of poetry reviewing in Canada.

How to Create a Capital Ash (Æ) in Microsoft Word (PC)

open the "Insert" menu
choose "Symbol"
a rectangular symbol menu will pop up
highlight "Æ" in the menu
click "insert"

- or -

use the shortcut sequence
Ctrl + Shift + & + A
= Æ

Beauty is An Eye in the Blender / The Truth is Out There

The writings/drawings of Æthel were made in Adobe Illustrator within a set of simple rules. My controlling technical principle was that Illustrator - important among recent technologies that change the parameters of concrete poetry - should be used in an unlearned, even amateur way. I downloaded free display fonts, converted these to "Outlines" and virtually hacked the letters apart, like with safety scissors at construction paper. I then precariously recombined the fragments into the tangles you see. Because no new lines were drawn, and the letters were generally kept at the same scale, the forms appear to emerge organically from lines, and potential lines, already present in the letterforms. The rules also meant that my intentions, graphic imagination and paranoiac itch-to-symmetry were so severely frustrated that the writings/drawings, after several years, still don't register to me as products of my own mind. For readers/viewers, it's the ubiquitousness of the display fonts - you'll see many of them on commercial signage every time you leave your mouldy Strathcona basement suite - that keeps them familiar enough for their mutations to be beastly. Ideological chimæras, like counter-intuitive puns on fatigued scraps of sagacity, they move towards the strange (by attraction or repulsion) without escaping the banal determinations of a disfluent commercial design vernacular.

DONATO MANCINI

Wheatabixy
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2008]
22”x30”
edition of 10 + 1
Commissioned by the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry
$600

DONATO MANCINI

The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goth Phase)
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30”
edition of 20
$400

DONATO MANCINI

The Jazzercise Dance of Hope
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30”
edition of 20
$400

DONATO MANCINI

Jonathan Livingston Boa Constrictor
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30”
edition of 20
$400

DONATO MANCINI

Vimid Ivage
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30”
edition of 20
$400

DONATO MANCINI

Gallery view.

DONATO MANCINI

Gallery view.

DONATO MANCINI

Adam Seelig Interviews Donato Mancini
chapbook design by Rodney Sanches
First printed in West Coast Line

Critical Chapbook,
12 photocopied pages
Edition of 60 copies

BOOKS

DONATO MANCINI

ÆTHEL
New Star Books
2007
$20

LIGATURES
New Star Books
2005
$20

CHRISTIAN BÖK

“ Odalisques ” - 2009

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Articles: Times of London: The Good Bök -- Times of London: Vowel Play

Utne Reader - 50 Visionaries who are Changeing the World

“The “Odalisques” constitute one of my idle experiments (the kind of work that I might do when I need a distraction from a more lengthy, more onerous project). Each of these nudes has been created by rearranging the 21 components used by typographers to design the letterforms of the alphabet. Each figure represents a permutation of exactly the same set of curves and shapes, each scaled and turned, perhaps overlapped, but never repeated nor inverted. I am trying to evoke a nude form by drawing according to a constraint, using only a fixed array of strokes. I am trying to evoke the female figure as a kind of difficult, aesthetic potential, imminent within the beauty of a fractured alphabet. I have drawn these images with the online toy found at www.typeisart.com. I have included this set in the show, simply because they all make use of the X-height fragment in exactly the same way, and consequently they are all connected by the anchor of this single curve."

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Odalisque [#04]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Odalisque [#11]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Odalisque [#12]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Odalisque [#13]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Odalisque [#14]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

-- SCALE REFERENCE --

CHRISTIAN BÖK

[repeat]

Odalisque [#14]
[Silkscreened ink on paper, 2009]
22”x30” [ - 4" image - ]
edition of 20
$400

CHRISTIAN BÖK

Gallery View

BOOKS

CHRISTIAN BÖK

CRYSTALLOGRAPHY
Coach House Books
1994 - Upgraded Edition 2003
$20

EUNOIA
Coach House Books
2001 - Upgraded 2009
$20

EUNOIA - CD
11 Tracks Audiobook, , 72 min .47 sec
performed by Christian Bök
recorded by Steve Venright, Torpor Vigil Industries
published by Coach House Books
2002
$20

MARINA ROY

"Kings and Creatures" - 2009

Marina Roy is a Vancouver based artist working across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, video, performance and writing. Roy has exhibited work across Canada, as well as in Europe and the U.S. She is assistant professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, UBC since 2002. The ideas investigated in her artwork and writing stem from her ongoing research in such areas as psychoanalysis, gender, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published the book sign after the x ______ , published by Arsenal Pulp Press and Artspeak. She is currently working on a new book Queuejumping, which will investigate the construction of nature, nomadism, human-animal distinction, and the letter Q.

The letterpress prints in this series use a variety of formal textual devices and influences—from monuments, signage, lists, concrete poetry—to deliver words, phrases, and quotes loosely related to the history of creaturely (or bare) life, in contrast to sovereignty and dominance. According to Giorgio Agamben, bare life is the mirror image of the sovereign; it is the embodiment of the “exception” within society, positioned outside of the law.

As social power structures become increasingly internalized within each subject’s body, so do these textual elements appear constricted by established aesthetic conventions—the monochrome, the “conceptual art” list—not to mention the limits of the mode of production itself. However, the use of obsolete technology to produce these works points to what could be construed as a melancholic reflection on history and our present moment: how we are most often caught within a negative infinity of new more cunning power structures from which it is difficult to find a way out. Psychoanalytic discourse also finds its way into these prints, in the form of language play, the use of the “totemic” animal in swearing as a mark of Oedipal defiance and desire, and the general sense of an underlying unconscious of civilization permeating these works.