Levi Sherman, The Kink's Gesture, Levi Sherman Designs, 2012

cover

A sharp and compact artists' book accompanied with short clipped snippets of typeset texts spread out across its length — but it left this reader none the wiser as to the true nature of 'the kink's gesture.' But perhaps, all the different display options that the snake book offers with its folds, blind alleys and abrupt transitions is the 'kink' that animates this book.

16 single-sided pages, individually 2.75" x 2.25" and unfolded 1ft 9.25". 

back cover

Takashi Homma, The Ginza Street, Tokyo, Japan, 2019, ed. 500

book with silver slip case

This is the 9th book Homma has created in homage to Ed Ruscha and his contributions to the field of artists' books. Specifically, this book is in homage to Ruscha's "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966) which was also a leporello that used a similar design in order to show every building on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. 

But there is more to this story. Photobook historians have noted the similarity of Ruscha's mapping of Sunset Strip with one in a 1954 pair of books published by the Japanese writer and artist Shohachi Kimura titled "Ginza Haccho", which is a book of photographs by Yoshikazu Suzuki that shows every building on Ginza Street in Tokyo in the same format as Homma's accordion. While Ruscha has demurred about revealing if he was aware of Suzuki's technique for recording both sides of this well-known street in Tokyo, others have also recorded this street in a similar manner. The most recent homage book, prior to Homma's, is Michalis Pilcher's "The Ginza Strip" (2018) that surveys Ginza street using the same technique with both of them adopting the same silver slip covers and formatting. One crucial difference however, is that Pilcher's photographs were taken during the day while Homma's were taken at night, thus inserting his own twist into this game of influence and appropriation one year after Pilcher's.

Pilcher's book can be found on this blog here: 

accordion publications: Michalis Pichler, The Ginza Strip, Kodoji Press: Berlin, Tokyo, 2018

53 pages, individually 7" x 5.5", and when unfolded 24ft 3.5"

Ellen Wallenstein, A Game of Chess, Women's Studio Workshop Print Center, Rosendale, NY, 1986

A work by this photographer and book artist based in New York who recently retired from teaching at Pratt Institute. I'm having a hard time getting the gist of this work that's been made with a plastic camera. A photo of a piece of Roman statuary on its front cover leads into a series of moody and blurry images that seem to be related to this piece of sculpture. Otherwise I'm at a loss to get the message, unless it's connected to some literary reference I'm unaware of (maybe the "Game of Chess" section in T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land", 1922?).

10 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 6", and unfolded 5ft.

reverse side

back cover

Mélanie Corre, Le Chaos, Terry Bleu, Amsterdam, 2024, ed. 300

An accordion that is rooted in a physical place, in this case it's the rocks found around Wrac'h island situated in Brittany, France. The rocks can only be seen at low tide and Corre has carefully depicted over 60 of them in this accordion. Corre has also done a number of other works that explore the subject of the rocks found in this vacation location, indeed this work comes from an exhibition of her's titled “Roch Gored: mapping chaos around the lighthouse.” The landscape also features a lighthouse at the entrance to the estuary and Corre introduces it in this poem about this piece:

Le Chaos

The lighthouse signals us

we are guardians of the coast,

tickled

       by the current

we have a good laugh 

                    underwater

tomorrow, 

     facing the chaos.

For another of Corre's works on the same theme on this blog see: accordion publications: Mélanie Corre, Cascade, Terry Bleu publisher, Amsterdam, 2021, ed. 200

7 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 3.5" and when unfolded 2.5ft

reverse side

back cover