In the mail

 

Coming Soon: Posts about Jason Rhoades, Rita McKeough, Gustav Metzger, William Anastasi, Rob Kovitz, and Nicole Eisenman. 

Rob Kovitz | The Sweets of Home

Rob Kovitz
The Sweets of Home
Winnipeg, Canada: Treyf Books, 2016
288 pp., 5.8 x 0.6 x 8.3", softcover
Edition size unknown

Part appropriation novel, part flip-book , The Sweets of Home follows a series of 'supercut' books by the Winnipeg-based artist, which include Dead and Cold, According to Plan, Room Behavior, Pig City Model Farm and the epic 8-volume set Ice Fishing in Gimli, which won the inaugural AGYU Artist Book of the Year Award in 2010.

On the right hand side of the book are stills of David Byrne from the acclaimed concert documentary Stop Making Sense, by Jonathan Demme (who died last month of heart disease). Watch a brief animation on vimeo, here. Two of Bryne's best songs are on the subject of 'home': This Must Be The Place [Naive Melody] by the Talking Heads and Home by Byrne and Brian Eno. The line "Home is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there", from the former, opens Kovitz' book.

The left hand side features a collection of found texts which contain the words: "home," "sweet," or "inquietude." The work was originally commissioned by Dazibao Gallery in Montreal.

Available from Amazon and http://www.Treyf.com.

Rob Kovitz | Dead Cold

Rob Kovitz
Dead and Cold
Winnipeg, Canada: Treyf Books, 2015
244 pp., 5.875 x 8.25",  softcover
Edition size unknown


Ten years in the making, Rob Kovitz' eight-volume bookwork Ice Fishing in Gimli is "an epic citation saga of desire, ambition, weather and landscape". The project was awarded the 2010 AGYU Artist Book of the Moment Prize, adjudicated by collector Joe Friday, then-Art Metropole director Ann Dean and artist Micah Lexier.

Dead and Cold, from the Excerpts From the Ice Fishing in Gimli Series, commemorates the 2014 discovery of elements from the missing ships of doomed 1845 Franklin polar expedition. Using the montage-appropriation style of his previous 'novels', the book imagines what may have happened to this and various other fateful northern peregrinations.

Available from Amazon, here, for $20. US.