Art Metropole

04 - 06 May 2018

AM @ Acid-Free Los Angeles Art Book Market

Blum + Poe, 2727 La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA

We’re pleased to announce our participation in the inaugural Acid-Free Artists Book Market , located at Blum + Poe, 2727 La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA. We’ll be tabling all weekend, and have partnered with Acid-Free on some excellent programming and launches. More details below!

Saturday, 6 PM:
Art Metropole presents : HANDBOOK: A Conversation with Anthea Black and Nick Shick of Queer Publishing Project

Sunday, 3 PM:
Art Metropole presents: Maia Asshaq + Patricia No: You can’t fail unless someone expects you to succeed, a conversation.

At the table all weekend:
DAUT DINTJA DAUT HELT, 2018
Kandis Friesen
limited edition flexographic-printed plastic bags (edition of 5000)
22” x 14” x 6”

~ DETAILS ~

LAUNCH:

DAUT DINTJA DAUT HELT, 2018
Kandis Friesen
limited edition flexographic-printed plastic bags (edition of 5000), 22” x 14” x 6”

Daut Dintja Daut Helt is a plastic bag multiple, a knock-off of a popular knock-off plastic bag sold in Ukrainian public markets.

This artist multiple will be distributed free-of-charge for items bought from AM’s booth at ACID-FREE, and will eventually be made available at other arts-related commercial spaces like museums, galleries, and book stores, and common commercial spaces like corner stores, grocery stores, markets and other stores. The bag will only be given with purchase of an item or items from the store that distributes it, and shall not be charged for, except where required by plastic bag tax regulations. It is not available for separate purchase, and functions as an artist multiple only through its relationship to market exchange for carrying purchased items.

The bag’s imagery is reworked from ancient pysanky designs of stylized oak leaves and the eight-pointed star, evoking the oak tree and the sun as enduring forces. The text is written in Russian Mennonite, a dwindling, diasporic and non-standardized oral language from the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Oral and visual texts sustain themselves through shifting forms, and the bag continues this, slipping across mediums and alphabets to stay buoyant, circulating, in motion; valued, valuable, protected.

The original knock-off bag pirates the BMW logo from the German multinational Bavarian Motor Works. The corporation’s logo is a knock-off itself, using an altered version of the Bavarian coat of arms banned from commercial use. This nationalist emblem has sustained BMW since 1917, throughout the company’s use of concentration camp labor in WWII military manufacturing to its luxury cars today. The desire for wealth and mobility held in the logo circulate internationally, present in a prominent BMW-branded plastic bag available for purchase in Ukrainian public markets, part of a small industry of knock-off designer plastic bags for daily market purchases. The contemporary roster of public market bags available now also includes prints of traditional embroidery patterns, placing corporate logos next to stylized patterns that hold the residue of valuable regional rushnyks, textiles and texts.

Daut Dintja Daut Helt employs Ukrainian folk design and Russian Mennonite language to rework the pirated BMW emblem, once again repositioning the national corporate logo onto a hand-held vessel for carrying. As a facsimile textile, the plastic bag contains, carries, and protects; it is used, stored, and re-used; it is a replicated text, invocation, and verse; it is the thing that holds.

Kandis Friesen ’s work is anchored in diasporic language, dispersed translations, and disintegrating archival forms. Drawing on Russian Mennonite, Ukrainian, and former Soviet geographies, her interdisciplinary compositions build from architectural, material, and spectral inhabitations of exile, amplifying minute and myriad histories at once. Her work has been presented at LUX, Images Festival, FIFA, Athens Digital Arts Festival, and MIX NYC. Her videos are distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo in Montréal.

PANEL DISCUSSION:

HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education
With Anthea Black and Nick Shick
Saturday, May 5, 6pm, in “The Den”

Please join Art Metropole and Queer Publishing Project at ACID FREE to celebrate the LA launch of HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education edited by Anthea Black and Shamina Chherawala. Together with members of the community, Black and Shick will discuss queer publishing practices as pedagogy.

HANDBOOK is a collaborative intervention in art and design pedagogy. It offers faculty a radical rethink on how to work with queer and transgender students on their path to becoming artists and designers – from the first day of school through to seminars, studio classes, and critiques. HANDBOOK draws directly from student experiences to help faculty of all orientations bring equitable teaching practices and queer curricula into art and design classes. Queer Publishing Project is a working group of over 100 students, alumni, staff and faculty at OCAD University and beyond who identify as queer and/or transgender.

This 112-page publication is produced in a limited edition of 1200 with a gatefold letterpress cover, printed by Nick Shick and Queer Publishing Project, on Vandercook Universal and No. 4 presses. HANDBOOK is designed by Cecilia Berkovic, with illustrations by Morgan Sea, and published by Queer Publishing Project and OCAD University Publications Program.

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in San Francisco and Toronto. Her studio work addresses feminist and queer history, collaboration, materiality, and labour and has been exhibited in Canada, the US, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway. Black is co-editor of HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education with Shamina Chherawala and Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade with Nicole Burisch. She is an Assistant Professor in Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Nicholas Shick is a queer, transgender artist and printmaker based in Toronto, Canada. Nick earned his BFA from NSCAD University and has assisted at several print shops including Island Press. As a printer at Open Studio, he has worked collaboratively with many artists including Tim Pitsiulak of Cape Dorset, Nunavut. In his role as Printmaking Technician at OCAD University, Nick was the Production Mentor and lead printer for HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education, and is the lead printer for Working Title Press, an artist’s residency in the Publications & Printmaking programs at OCAD U.

TALK/LAUNCH:

You can’t fail unless someone expects you to succeed, a conversation.
Maia Asshaq + Patricia No
Sunday, May 6, 3pm in “The Den”

“There will be no situation that Americans will confront that they won’t hammer into that box of success and failure.” – Scott Sandage

Join Maia Asshaq and Patricia No for a conversation on the occasion of the launch of a new book by Asshaq, You can’t fail unless someone expects you to succeed, published by Art Metropole for ACID-FREE.

Before the development of credit scores, failure meant nothing. Before the mid-1800’s, it’s hard to even find the word in use at all. Failure went from representing a lack of achievement in business to representing a lack of personal fulfillment.

When is comes to ending a project that is both public and personal, who gets to decide where it falls on the failure spectrum? If you say the word failure enough it starts to lose meaning, does failing often enough have the same effect?

Maia Asshaq (b. 1987) is an Iraqi born writer and artist currently living in Los Angeles, CA. She is the founder of DittoDitto Books and the Detroit Art Book Fair. In 2015 she received the first Gilda Award for emerging writers from the Kresge Foundation. She is a 2016 Salzburg Global Forum Fellow.

Patricia No is a writer, editor, and publisher living in Los Angeles, CA. She co-founded Publication Studio and founded and edits the literary journal * Weekday *

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