Description
Lives and works in California
About this piece:
Girls vs. Books is an artist’s book based around a photographic series about vernacular altered books.
The extra-illustrated books in the photos were grangerized, stamped, and drawn in between 1865 and the 1970’s by young women who didn’t think twice about violating the sanctity of the printed page with their own editorializations. Several of the (known) defacers grew up to be writers, editors and artists themselves.
My edition echoes its subject matter: I constructed it by cutting up and rebinding commercially-printed books of my photos and then titling them with rubber stamps.
Materials:
paper, ink, bookcloth, board
About the artist:
Under her imprint Deeply Game Publications, Sara L. Press has published nineteen book works in editions that range in size from 3 to 100 copies. She is also half of MOB of TWO, a collaborative imprint with Tiana Krahn. Her projects have looked at neurodiversity, peculiar areas of overlap between nature and culture (for example: dog fighting, feral children, and our co-evolution with snakes); constructions of masculinity and femininity in our culture (e.g. bloodsports, military survival manuals, and mis-remembered fairy-tales), and the relationship between emotional and scientific reasoning (see Earth, the Bestiary, Cartoon Physics, and Our Specters). Her work is intended to expand peoples’ capacity for non-dichotomous thinking, which she feels is becoming something of a lost art.>Sara’s work can be seen by the public in more than 50 rare books collections including those at the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and dozens of universities’ collections.
