ACID-FREE
Los Angeles Art Book Market
Opening May 4, 6-9pm
May 5 & 6, 11am-7pm
Blum & Poe
Culver City, CA
X Artists' Books is happy to participate in the first year of Acid-Free, the new Los Angeles Art Book Market. Our events and special exhibitions are listed below. For a complete list of Acid-Free exhibitors and programming, click here.
EXHIBITION
X Artists' Books is pleased to present the suite of Eve Wood's drawings for The Artists' Prison. The Artists’ Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison’s warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists’ Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations—sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental—that the book’s critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists’ Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood’s drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant’s text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.
For more info, click here.
EXHIBITION
X Artists' Books will be showing, for the first time in the US, the limited edition of (Zus), a visual essay by the French photographer Benoît Fougeirol, views of and views from eleven of the “Zones urbaines sensibles” (Sensitive Urban Zones) on the peripheries of Paris reveal harsh paradoxes of modern society. These poor, marginal districts were defined by administrative boundaries in response to the “emergence of a social problem.” Through the synecdoche of architecture—its materials, patterns, and surfaces—Fougeirol presents the stubborn vitality and dereliction of the ZUS, and the failures of collective imagination that they represent. (Zus) documents each territory with an inventory comprising photographs, graphic representations, and toponyms, none of which alone can account for a totality. The book’s cumulative structure raises questions about the tools of representation and the nature of individual perspective.
In this limited edition of unbound artist’s proofs, the booklets can be laid out open side by side; thus the geographical area is rendered anew, within the printed space. A text by the author, poet, and playwright Jean-Christophe Bailly reflects on the broader significance and lived experience of the ZUS, following a lyrical thread through inhospitable spaces. The edition comprises one subfolder containing a map (61 x 93 cm [36 x 24 in.], unfolded), two 4-page sheets with Bailly’s text in French and English, and 11 unbound booklets representing each zone (352 pages total). The booklets contain 11 aerial black-and-white photographs; 11 IGN (National Geographic Institute) map details printed in black and white, and 199 color photographs.
For more info, click here.
BOOK SIGNING
High Winds signing by Sylvan Oswald
Saturday, May 5 at 12pm
X Artists' Books table at Acid-Free
How does sleep—or its absence—change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann’s atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics, net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald’s text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions—inspired by the author’s experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful—High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night’s sleep.
Sylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles who creates plays, texts, publications, and video. His work explores the ways we forge our individual and national identities.
For more info, click here.
CONVERSATION
Radical Texts
A conversation with curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Ruth Estévez, moderated by Catherine Wagley
Sunday, May 6 at 12pm
The Den at Acid-Free
This conversation between Fajardo-Hill and Estévez takes as a point of departure their two recent Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985at the Hammer Museum and The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of Warat REDCAT. Both exhibitions are traveling to institutions beyond Los Angeles—Radical Womento the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca, São Paulo, and The Words of Othersto the Perez Art Museum (Miami), the Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the Jumex Collection (Mexico City), among other institutions. X Artists' Books published The Words of Others, the first full English translation of Ferrari’s literary collage Palabras ajenas, in 2017. Catherine Wagley will moderate a conversation about the importance of books to each exhibition as both an archive and a correction to the art historical record.
Ruth Estévez is an independent curator and set designer based in Los Angeles and Mexico City. From 2012 to 2018 she was the gallery director and curator of REDCAT, where she has worked with artists including Javier Téllez, Quinn Latimer, and Allora & Calzadilla, and curated the group exhibitions Agency (Assembly: Before and After the Split Second Recorded), Hotel Theory (co-curated with Sohrab Mohebbi), and Chalk Circles. Her exhibition for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time LA/LA was The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War, which opened in September 2017, and was also a live performance of Ferrari's seminal text. From 2007 to 2011, Estévez served as chief curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. In 2010 she cofounded LIGA Space for Architecture Mexico City.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an independent British/Venezuelan art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, specializing in Latin American art. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. Fajardo-Hill co-curated, with Andrea Giunta, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, a survey of radical artistic practices by women artists in Latin America, which opened in 2017 at the Hammer Museum under the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. Fajardo-Hill is also working on the Sayago & Pardon initiative Abstraction in Action, a multiplatform project on contemporary abstraction in Latin America, which will encompass a series of exhibitions. She was guest curator at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, for the exhibition Ricardo Valverde: Experimental Sights, 1971–1996 in May 2014, and the general curator of the 19 Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala in June 2014.
Catherine Wagley is an art writer and critic based in Los Angeles.
For more info, click here.
BOOK SIGNING
The Artists' Prison signing by Alexandra Grant and Eve Wood
Sunday, May 6 at 2pm
X Artists' Books table at Acid-Free
The Artists’ Prison, with text by Alexandra Grant and drawings by Eve Wood, imagines the art world in a Kafkaesque future state, where creativity can be a criminal offense and art making, a punishment.
Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles–based artist who uses language, literature, and exchanges with writers as the basis for her work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography.
Eve Wood is a visual artist, poet, and critic whose drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, and Ochi Projects.
For more info, click here.