Tag Archive for 'store event'

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Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer Reads From Formal Additive Programs

Published on September 30, 2009 0 Comments
Oct ’09
29
7:00 pm

This is not another portfolio book by an artist… or at least it’s trying not to be. Formal Additive Programs, Nadine Nakanishi’s first release is an attempt to provide insight into a daily art practice and process, while focusing on the commonalities of figurative and abstract images. Formal Additive Programs offers 18 simple instructions to help the reader expand upon a singular idea, a practice that aids Nakanishi in her art-making everyday.

This book release party will also feature Dakota Brown and Nick Butcher. Brown, who wrote the poetic preface to the book, will be reading from his work. Butcher (www.nickbutcher.net) is to follow with a musical set, interpreting the 18 steps of instruction that make up the books content. The audience is encouraged to draw along with the instructions and the music.

Can a set of instructions be so beautifully imbricated as to occlude their own identity as instructions? Can rules for drawing be expressed in a language that eschews the visual, a language more attuned to the patterns of acoustic space and kinesthetics? Nadine Nakanishi’s Formal Additive Programs answers these questions with an enthusiastic, quiet, unpretentious ‘yes’. The title indicates that these are programs for constructing patterns. With these programs, Nakanishi demonstrates how suggestions, rules, axioms, can allow emergent creative processes to thrive. The familiar paradox is that creativity can perhaps best be conceptualized in terms of limits. The particular can find its horizon in the infinite, as long as contingency is allowed to breathe life into the project. Formal Additive Programs builds bit-by-bit, but this is something very different from deductively-arranged building blocks.  These aren’t building blocks at all. To keep things aural: these are more like building tones.— Dave Park, Associate Professor of Communication, Lake Forest College

Formal Additive Programs
Format, 7” x 9.75”,
Cover and Interior, 2-pms colors / Interior, 28 pages
Hand-printed silk-screen dust jacket – First printing, limited Edition 250

For more info about the author go to: www.yoneko.net, or www.sonnenzimmer.com

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Thumbs + Knuckles and The Dreaded Biscuits Zine Launch and Reading

Published on September 26, 2009 0 Comments
Oct ’09
22
7:30 pm

What do you get when you mix 36 graphic designers, 34 writers, and 3 illustrators? The result is a double Zine featuring emerging writers and designers from Columbia College Chicago. Columbia faculty members Craig Jobson, Patrick Hogan, Jotham Burrello, Rob Duffer, and John Upchurch, the intrepid Production Manager, supervised the production of a 68-pp full color “Zine Columbia — Summer 2009,” aka “The Dreaded Biscuits / Thumbs and Knuckles”.

The Zine’s on-line presence can be found at:

http://adweb.colum.edu/~thumbsandknuckles/

http://adweb.colum.edu/~thedreadedbiscuits/

Please come celebrate the eighth Zine produced since 2003, and the first one printed offset. Featured readings and merriment will ensue between the book stacks of Quimby’s.

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John Porcellino reads from Map of My Heart

Published on September 18, 2009 0 Comments
Oct ’09
16
7:00 pm

Map of My Heart celebrates the twentieth anniversary of John Porcellino’s seminal and influential comics zine, King-Cat Comics, which he began self-publishing in 1989, and which has been his predominant means of expression ever since. In this collection, Porcellino, while living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce, crafts a melancholic, tender graphic-ballad of heartbreak and reflection. Known for his sad, quiet honesty, rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium’s more visually intricate masters. Few other artists are able to so expertly contemplate the sadness, beauty, and wonder of life in so few lines.

John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968, and began drawing and writing at an early age, compiling his work into little hand-made booklets. His acclaimed self-published zine, King-Cat Comics and Stories, begun in 1989, has found a devoted worldwide audience, and is one of the most influential comics series of the past twenty years.

For more information please visit www.king-cat.net or www.drawnandquarterly.com.

Also on the bill is musician and poet PATRICK PORTER who will read from his work and perform an acoustic set.

“Beneath the crude linework and dream-journalism, Porcellino has crafted an affecting scrapbook of a part–time artist’s life. The decade-plus remove from these comics’ initial publication only adds another layer of poignancy, since so many of its concerns are those of a young man, unaccountably adrift in a decade geared towards his generation… A–”
—THE ONION AV CLUB

“Porcellino is a master at miniature poignance.” –ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

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Grant Reynolds Signs Comic Diorama

Published on September 12, 2009 0 Comments
Oct ’09
6
7:00 pm

Grant Reynolds has been making and self-publishing comics for the better part of his life. By the time you see him at this event he will have turned thirty years old only a few weeks prior. You might wanna wish him a happy birthday (belated) when you see him sitting at the table signing copies of his new book published by Top Shelf entitled Comic Diorama, or even ask how his summer was. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Grant Reynolds, where have I heard that name before?” …well, it might have been from The Skeleton News or Trubble Club, or you may have read one of his books, like Smaller Parts or To the Mouth of the Source…or maybe you both just talked about movies in someone’s kitchen at a party. In any case, if he owes you money, never returned that book he borrowed, or you’ve just got some personal score you’ve been waiting to settle, you’ll know where to find him on October 6th at 7pm.

“Chicagoan mini-comics mastermind.”  — Al Burian, Burn Collector

For more info: http://www.myspace.com/grantreynolds

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Hans Rickheit Presents The Squirrel Machine

Published on September 11, 2009 0 Comments
Oct ’09
10
7:00 pm

WHAT IS THE SQUIRREL MACHINE? A rodent ensnarement device? A mechanism for concealing one’s guarded harvest? An anachronistic fable for the convulsive elite? A nugatory diversion for the subliterate? The answer to that question can be obtained in the form of an unusual new graphic novel in a book-signing tour ploughing its way through the northeast coast this Autumn.

THE SQUIRREL MACHINE is the brainchild of HANS RICKHEIT, who will be making appearances to autograph books, make sketches and speak personally to curious readers.

The Plot: Situated in a fictive 19th Century New England town, two brothers, Edmund and William Torpor confront public scorn when they reveal their musical creations built from strange technologies and scavenged animal carcasses. Driven to seek a concealment for their aberrant activities, they make a startling discovery. Will they divine the mystery of THE SQUIRREL MACHINE?

This book is a meticulously-rendered creation that defies all known genres. It can best be described as “PROTO-SURREALIST” or “RETRO-FUTURIST” Disregarding labels and buzz-phrases, it is ultimately an immutably strange and haunting narrative that transcends known logics and presumptive dream-barriers. A distillation of subconscious beauty and madness. A dangerous object for the incautious. A revelation for the undernourished crypto-seeker .

HANS RICKHEIT  was born in 1973 and grew up in New England, lived in the basement of an eccentric art gallery/performance space called the Zeitgeist Gallery from 1997-2002, and currently resides in Philadelphia. Aside from his many self-published efforts, he has appeared in many anthologies, including PAPER RODEO, HOAX and KRAMERS ERGOT.

“Rickheit is a vastly under-seen talent.” – Tom Spurgeon, THE COMICS REPORTER

www.squirrelmachine.org, www.thesquirrelmachine.blogspot.com www.chromefetuscomics.com

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