This is a really fascinating publishing project that the editor, Gary Kachadourian, initiated around 2019. Kachadourian was previously located in Baltimore and for over twenty years he worked as an arts adminstrator in the Baltimore Office for the Promotion of the Arts (BOPA). BOPA provides funding and support to artists and arts organizations, as well as producing cultural events in the city of Baltimore.
Kachadourian is also an established visual artist who creates graphite and ink drawings of everyday places, objects and creates "...room sized installations that feature forests, homes, vacant lots and even chicken bones." Kachadourian's works have been presented in numerous exhibitions including the Baltimore Museum of Art.
All of the accordions featured here follow the same model with Kachadourian playing the role of printer and engraver in producing four image accordions in open editions with all of them printed via the mezzotint process. The mezzotint printing process is well known for the luxurious and rich tonal qualities of the prints, as witnessed in the works featured in this post. Below is an image of the printing press, an engraved metal plate and final print.
While Kachadourian preferred not provide me with a statement about this project stating that it wasn't "...because I want to be secretive, it's mostly just because I'm personally uncomfortable as a writer." So some questions remain unanswered about these accordions, in particular how he chooses which artists to collaborate with, how the four images are chosen and the size of the print run to name a few. However, what is clear about this project is that it does not play by the usual rules particularly with the open edition feature and the incredibly affordable prices of the publications. The works are collaborations between Kachadourian, the editor and engraver, and the wide variety of artists and the different subject matter that they bring to the table. All these features would seem to reflect a deeper democratic ethos underpinning the activities of this press, with the focus on making these works available to as many people as possible and across varied socio-economic groups.
One immediate feature common to all these accordions is their tactile quality and how Kachadourian's use of different types of paper with their ragged edges, coupled with the back covers' letterpress impressions of the work's contents, all cohere in creating these compelling and wonderful mezzotint accordion works.
Lanesville Press works are available for purchase at Printed Matter: Printed Matter
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Jeff Benjamin, All Inhibitory is Dream: An Archeology of Whiteport N.Y.,
Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2024
The works in this accordion emerged from a 2020 internship in which Benjamin worked with a group of six students from St. Olaf College under the theme "Creative Visualization in Archeology." He sent to each student "...a box of artifacts from my research site at Whiteport, New York - an abandoned cement and barrel manufacturing town - offering them some loose guidelines for how to interpret or respond to them." In 2021 the results were displayed at Columbia University as an installation in their center for archeology titled "All inhibitory is dream (of archeology and transcendence)." The same year Benjamin would successfully defend his PhD dissertation in Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a dissertation titled "All inhibitory is dream: An archeology of Whiteport, New York."
4 single-sided pages, individual 6.75" x 4.75", and unfolded 1' 7"
Left: The Retrieval of the Insensible Right: The Recovery of Discarded Sensibilities
Center page: The Redemption of the Dismissed
Back cover
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Shannon Collis, Strata, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2024
Collis, a Canadian artist, is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maryland with research interests ranging from accoustic ecology, digital media to sound and video installations. The images in this accordion are from Collis' immersive multi-screen sculptural installation titled "Strata" that was installed at the Philip and Muriel Museum of Art from January 22 to May 30, 2021.
"Strata" envelopes viewers in an environment of sound and images from across "...Alberta's Boreal Forest, the Athabasca River, and Fort McMurray to underscore the scale of the Fort Hills Suncor Oil Sands and Syncrude Oil Plant, the third-largest known crude bitumen reservoir on the plant." And further, the work "...explores complex interactions of the social, the economic, and the environmental through contrasts between natural landscapes and human industry, while highlighting nature's persistence in the face of industrial exploitation." [exhibition text]
4 single-sided pages, individual 4" x 5.75", and unfolded 1' 11"
Back cover
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Terence Hannum, The Illusion of Sleep, Lanesville Press,
Lanesville, NY, 2024
Hannum is a Baltimore based visual artist, writer and musician. This accordion and its drawings of poisonous flowers is part of a larger series titled "Poisonous Flowers" that Hannum explored from 2020-2022. On his website Hannum has this to say about this work, "This body of work focuses on poisonous plants and their beauty but obstructed or blurred as if under the poison of the bloom." [terencehannum.com]
4 single-sided pages, individual 7" x 6", and unfolded 2'
Back cover
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Terence Hannum, In Full Flower Let Night Come, Lanesville Press,
Lanesville, NY, 2024
Another work in Hannum's "Poisonous Flowers" series with this accordion detailing the poisonous effects of each individual flower. From left to right the flowers are: Henbane, Lily of the Valley, Oleander and Arisaema.
4 single-sided pages, individual 6.75" x 4.75", and unfolded 1' 7"
Back cover
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Scott Hug, Hometown: California, Missouri, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2023
Hug is an interdisciplinary artist and a photographer based in upstate New York. Hug was born in the capitol city of Missouri, Jefferson City which is 24 miles from a town called California. The four photographs & titles that comprise this accordion were all taken in California and emphasize different features of this city of 4,500 residents. Established in 1834 the city took its name from the then westwood expansion and growing interest in California. A little over a decade later the gold rush would begin and "Go west, young man" would be the refrain that encapsulated the rush to the west coast with its promise of untold riches.
4 single-sided pages, individual 4.75" x 4.75", and unfolded 1' 7"
Back cover
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Cynthia Connolly, Incas, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2022
Connolly is a photographer, artist and curator from Washington, DC, who started her career "...by creating my own exhibitions in abandoned buildings, cafes, museums, bars, and backyards then added other artists to my exhibitions."
"Inca" is the term used to describe the large white X markers placed on the ground that are used in aerial mapping and obviously the name references the lines that the Incas inscribed in their territories. Connolly has travelled all over the country since 2000 in her search to discover and photograph these unique sites. She notes that there are a lot of them in Arizona, the Southwest as well as Wyoming, although they are quite hard to find!
4 single-sided pages, individual 5.5" x 5", and unfolded 1' 8"
Back cover
Audrey Gatewood, New World, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2022
Audrey Gatewood is a photographer who was was born in Baltimore and their work features elements of fantasy, queer community and is deeply collaborative with the larger Baltimore arts community.
The original photographic images in this accordion came about in response to Gatewood asking friends to "...imagine society deeply changing, at a molecular level, into a fantasy. Who would you become as the world shifts? Each person created their own character and designed and styled themselves with deep personal intention."
The four different persona illustrated in this accordion are:
Faerie of Darkness
Aquarius
The Qweerior
The Nomad
4 single-sided pages, individual 5.5"x4.5", and unfolded 1'6"
Back cover
Elisa Harkins, Muscogee (Creek) Hymn, Lanesville Press,
Lanesville, NY, 2022
The four images in this accordion are frames from a short video that Elisa Harkins made titled "Muscogee (Creek) Hymn," 2022. Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist, composer and curator. The video features both a native woman and man walking in a wooded landscape next to a river, performing simple rituals, he takes a boat ride and finally they gather around the fire she has made. Accompanying the video is a beautiful Muscogee Creek hymn soundtrack.
Below each of the four images are verses from a Muscogee Creek hymn that is still being sung today titled "Espoketis Omes Kerreskos".
Muscogee Creek hymns have a rich, but little known tradition with one expert claiming, "We're talking about a pre-removal music that happened in the early 1800's and was a combination of African spiritual, Muscogee words and perhaps some influences from their ceremonial songs and then all that being started by the Scottish missionaries who bring in Christianity and their own singing style...all three of those merge into what we now know as Muscogee Creek hymns which are a unique musical product in American and world music history." (Dr. Hugh Foley)
Link to video: Muscogee (Creek) Hymn - YouTube
4 single-sided pages, individual 5" x 5", and unfolded 1' 8"
Back cover
Gary Mason, Family Ties, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2022
A fun Oklahoma infused one-liner accordion from this Tulsa native, one of the founding members of Black Moon, an all-Black artist collective and a DJ while maintaining his professional photographic work.
4 single-sided pages, individual 4.5" x 5", and unfolded 1' 8"
Back cover
Jocko Weyland, Radical Contours, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2022
Four images of really interesting looking skate parks from across the country with each location printed underneath the image. Jocko Weland is also the author of The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World, Grove Press, 2002, so he definitely knows a radical skate park when he sees one!
4 single-sided pages, individual 4.5" x 5", and unfolded 1' 8"
Back cover
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Nathan Young, Grandfather Peyote, Heart of the World, Lanesville Press, Lanesville, NY, 2022
Nathan Young is an enrolled member of The Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendent of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe. The four shapes illustrated here accompanied with their names represent the shapes of four indigenous territories in the Hudson Valley: Mohican, Lenape, Schaghticoke and Wappinger tribes.
Young is an artist and scholar currently pursuing a PhD in the University of Oklahoma's Native American Art History Doctoral program. He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College's Milton-Avery School of the Arts. Currently his work is focused on Indigenous Sonic Agency.
4 single-sided pages, individual 6.75" x 4.75", and unfolded 1' 7"
Back cover
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