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ARTIST'S BOOKS: Facing ARTIST'S BOOKS: Archive ARTIST'S BOOKS: Burning Editions
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Andrew Forster: Light in the Head

(1995; 80 pages, sewn, colour and b&w photos, 15 x 23cm)

"There is light streaming from the top of my head. Rushing straight upwards. Flames dart on my shoulders. I have noticed that things, objects that is, have begun to go through me. Through my arms and legs. Thorough my chest and belly. At first they needed considerable velocity. Now they just drift through. No...at first I tried hard to believe in the solidity of things. Now I'm getting thinner. I think I'm afraid. I think I should be trying to keep them out, or trap them inside."

A book of photographs and found images juxtaposed with twenty texts about movement through water and air, through time and memory. A dream-like discontinuity gradually builds into a visceral approximation of the drifting rise and ebb of consciousness. A collaboration between Burning Editions and Nexus Press, Atlanta.

Dominion

(1995; 6 pages, 64 x 43cm, spiral bound)

A large-format spiral-bound artists book consisting of text, duotone and full-colour images collaged on to six pages to be read consecutively. A project improvised on the light table during the film-stripping stage of production. Produced during a residency at Nexus Press, Atlanta.

Andrew Forster: Andrew Forster

(1985; 88 pages, perfect bound, 63 b&w photos, 27 x 21cm)

Based on a catalogue on the work of Jannis Kounellis by Rudi Fuchs from the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, this artists book reproduces the original publication maintaining all original texts and art-historical reproductions but replacing the name 'Kounellis' with 'Forster' wherever it appears and replacing all images of Kounellis' work with new ones including out of focus shots from inside the museum, photos of handles of industrial machinery and tools, famous landmarks, spoons, and a detailed diagram of a gas water heater. An examination of the institutional exegesis of the artist-as-hero.

Andrew Forster: Retrospective (1942- )

(1983; 47p.: 54 ill.: 23.5 x 17cm)

Bookwork/catalogue which accompanied a retrospective exhibition of the work of an artist named Andrew Forster (1942- ) at Eye Level Gallery, Halifax. Included are texts by curator Milicent Wagner (A Life and Work) and historian Hans Pieter Teufler (Andrew Forster and the Timekepers of Value) and an interview with the artist. Dedicated to Elmyr de Hory.

Burning Editions

 

Burning Editions was established in Montreal in 1992 by three artists with a particular interest in artist's writing and book works as an integral part of artistic practice. Andrew Forster, Stephen Horne and Lani Maestro generated projects from their individual interests with the original titles being publications related to exhibitions at Galerie Burning, a floating gallery space in Montreal which existed from 1991-4.

This page contains information about Burning Editions books with samples from each publication and information about the artists. It also includes a list of back issues of Harbour Magazine, 'journal of art and everyday life' edited by Lani Maestro and Stephen Horne (1990-4).

Some Burning Editions books are available through Galerie Articule, Montreal, ABC-Arts Books Canada and Printed Matter, New York. If you have trouble finding a Burning book please contact the address below for direct sales.

b u r n i n g (at) reluctant.ca

 

 

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Stan Sharshall: Exhibitions, Proposals & Drawings

(1994; 64p.: 83 col. ill.; 15 x 21.5cm; TULA Foundation, Atlanta)

A personal monograph on thework of Atlanta artist Stan Sharshall (1950-92) which accompanied an exhibition of Sharshall's drawings at the TULA Foundation Gallery, Atlanta in 1994 (a project organised by David Lee, Lil Friedlander, Dan Talley and Andrew Forster). The book includes texts by David Lee (From X to Mr. Blue) and Dan Talley (Approximation of UnattainableThings) and documentation of many of Sharshall's installations, performances, drawings and proposals whose elegant and rigorous conceptual investigations swing in the space between the personal and the social: between the tentativeness of subjective identity and the infinite.

Stephen Horne:Here to Zero

(1983; 40p.: 5 col. ill.: 21 x 15cm)

Here to Zeno is a publication which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at S. L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto. Reprodictions of images of fire (which were also placed in the print-storage drawers of the gallery) are juxtaposed to a lengthy text by philosopher S. B. Mallin (author of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy) about the work and the intrinsic relationship between the exhibition (whose gallery manifestation was a number of juice jars partially filled with water sitting on the floor) and the publication itself.

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Andrew Forster:de mémoire

(1991; 16p.: 2 ill.; 19 x 14cm; bilingual)

Bookwork for an exhibition entitled de mémoire includes a story by the artist, poems by Russian writer Ossip Mandelstam and texts and photographs from the exhibition.

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Andrew Carlisle:Eleven Stories For Outside

(1993; 48p.: 10 ill.: 14 x 21cm)

Artist's book including the eleven stories of the title as well as photographs and drawings by the artist. From one of the stories: "Waking from a dream of fire you realize an animal is sleeping on the back of your head. Its noise is a fire cracking and splitting the air around it, YOU will never get back to sleep, with that animal there. Just in time not to disturb it, realize that you are the two of you, both, working towards its unknown goal. You are the bed. You must lie still. Defer to the inevitability of the benevolence of the unknown goal. You are in deep shit now. This is no joke. You must lie still."

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Michael Fernandes: Sensible

(1992; 56p.: 28 ill.: 21 x 24cm; bilingual)

Produced for Michael Fernandes' installation of the same name at Articule Gallery, Montreal. Originally from Trinidad and now living and working in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Fernandes', whose improvised installations are widely influential Canada, uses language, found images and various humorous devices (for example the title of the work has completely different meaning in french and english) to examine, in his own idiosyncratic way, the politics of difference in a 24p artist's project. The bookwork also includes an introduction by Andrew Forster, a conversation with the artist, and photos/documentation of many past works in a format conceived in collaboration with the artist.

Stephen Horne: This Silver Thing with Expert Skin

(1995; 36 pages, 13 x 20cm, perfect bound; bilingual)

Fourteen stories by Stephen Horne with french translation by Claire D. A solitary image of a tornado, reduced to postage-stamp size, prefaces these very short stories of apocalypse, alienation and the luxury of epic extremes. From Bells, Glass: "It was good. I wrote a lot of stories that night. We should do this more often. The fire was strong. I threw a lot of things onto it, things that really we didn't need or want anymore. I threw glass onto it, I threw bells onto it, then bigger things: a crippled Boeing, a sick mamba complete with a few dozen live mice, an ageing mainframe, and then I went on to the really big things, the things that were taking up a lot of space, things like the Aegean Sea, a few Greek islands, a lot of mountains from Tibet..."

Ron Huebner: Need Me Like I Need You

(1993; 32p.: col. ill.: 12 x 9cm; bilingual)

Full colour artist's book documents many of Vancouver artist Ron Huebner's sculptures and sound-sculptures in a shirt-pocket format including Huebner's proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation (and the foundation's response) to cast a gold A-bomb, a cast lead sleeping bag, and a bed made of red hot heating-element hearts. Includes text by Andrew Forster and a story by the artist.

Toby MacLennan: How Will I Know I'm Here

(1994; 80p.: 43 ill., 7 col.; 21 x 14cm)

Documentsartist/filmmaker/writer Toby MacLennan's most recent film-installation. This work was precipitated by the deaths of a friend and of the artist's mother and grapples with loss as both tragedy and epiphany: "The liminal state of the dying and those intimate with them is the subject of an intense difficulty of articulation in Western Culture...MacLennan seems less interested in the project of self-healing as resolution, than in proposing a vocabulary or syntax of spiritual extremity. Such a vocabulary might allow an exploration and articulation of transitional points in human experience." (from a review by A. Martin) The book begins with a section of colour stills juxtaposed with stories from the film. It also includes a transcript of the film and a discussion between MacLennan and curator Andrew Forster. The book also documents three other film-installations by MacLennan; The Mouth of the Sky (1988), How Much Far is There (1984) and Absence of a Hole (1981).

Lani Maestro, Mindy Yan Miller, Baco Ohama: Justice in the Flesh

(1994; 24 pages, 5 b&w reproductions, 23 x 23cm; bilingual)

Catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same title curated by Stephen Horne at Galerie Articule, Montreal. Essay by Stephen Horne translated by Claire D. "These three artists ...are concerned with the relevance of embodiment to the project of linking the social and personal. The exhibition focuses on works incorporating practices of the self; processes from which artworks emerge which bring the self back to the body, back to embodied subjectivity. Through these practices a wholeness of experience is recollected, and from this an empowerment arises which grounds the ideal of justice in the body of experience."ュHorne

Lani Maestro: Cradle / Ugoy

(1996; 36 pages, 16 b&w reproductions, 23 x 23cm)

Catalogue of an exhibition of Maetro's work at Art in General, New York. The works in the exhibition which are documented in the catalogue are the installations Cradle (1996), Ako Ikaw. Ang Desyerto. (I Am You, The Desert), (1994) and a book thick of ocean (un livre en plein mer), 1993. The catalogue includes essays by Carolyne Forch, Rina Carvajal and Stephen Horne, an interview with the artist and documentation of related artworks. A collaboration with Art in General, New York, NY.

Lani Maestro: le soufle bless / a wound in the lung

(1994; 48 pages, 17b&w reproductions, 25 x 21cm; bilingual)

Publication accompanying a residency and the exhibition of the installation of the same name at La Chambre blanche, Québec. Includes a text by Kerri Sakamoto, a Japanese-Canadian writer and screenwriter living in Toronto, documentation of the installation ( a room filled to thigh-level with black earth with a body-sized round hollow at its centre) and an essay by Stephen Horne.

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Beaty Popescu: This Green Bag

(1993; 40p.: 14 ill.; 21 x 23cm; bilingual)

Includes a text, "The Possibility of Nearness", by Stephen Horne, a statement and drawings by the artist and documentation of the works in the exhibition of Popescu's "emergence" objects and drawings entitled This Green Bag at Galerie Burning, Montreal in 1993. "The work moves through the body where I dwell. (Nevertheless it is easy to be constantly sucked back up into the head, where we think out thoughts. Such thoughts are thoughts out of the body, with little regard for the body.)...My explorations are phenomenal. They move from a sensing. My desire to make springs from a vigilant and restless waiting and watching for that which emerges and moves"ュPopescu

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Andrew Forster: Facing

144 duotone images. A book of self-composed portraits; people looking at their own reflection in the mirror. Each photograph is taken from behind the subject, the camera looking over his or her shoulder towards the reflected image. The mirror allows each sitter to compose themselves for their portrait, seeing themselves exactly as they will be photographed, the camera capturing what is normally a private moment, before the mirror, putting on the face each of us presents to the world. The subjects see themselves being seen, and are seen (by the photograper and by the viewer) looking at their own image.

 

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Michael Maranda: Wittgenstein's Corrections

(130 pages, soft cover, 7"x8")

Wittgenstein's Corrections is based on a facsimile edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's manuscript for the Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus. "Wittgenstein's Corrections is particularly interesting because the book, rather like illuminated manuscripts, lends itself to an interesting evasion of easy shunting into "artist book", literary read, philosophic text....this ability to shuttle between genres, distilling questions and creating points of reflection, through a negotiating of not only the content but the objectness of the book itself (its installation as an object), is exactly one of the richest fruits in working with the "artist book" genre—which actually is not "artist book"..but "artists in relationship with book—and the responses and critical practices that explode from this contact." (Shauna Beharry, co-editor; Silent Press)