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ARTIST PUBLISHING AT THE VANCOUVER ART BOOK FAIR

With the start of the Vancouver Art Book Fair kicking off tomorrow, allow VIA to entice you to head over to the Vancouver Art Gallery this weekend.

With the start of the Vancouver Art Book Fair kicking off tomorrow, allow VIA to entice you to head over to the Vancouver Art Gallery this weekend.

Here is an interview with two artists who will be showing, launching and selling their publication Monument. Leanne J and My Name is Scot went on a two month residency where they got to know several local artists, architects and creative types. Alongside their work, they will also be showing artist publications created by other artists who they worked with during their residency.

Both Artists have had work that was at previous iterations of the VA/BF, this time they'll be at the fair touting their wares and sharing new works by artists from Sofia, Bulgaria. They'll also be giving a talk, check out the program schedule on the VA/BF site for more info.

Happy Art Book-worming weekend!

VIA: What is Public Address all about?

Scot: It started as we were doing a residency in Sofia, Bulgaria this summer. We had been doing a body of work we debuted last year at a live performance festival. A performance where we have these two characters, the activist and the authority figure which involves Leanne dressing up as an activist and me dressing up as a riot cop. We'd been interested in how things of this nature are put forward into the media and how the politics of these events become polarised and authoritarian. We were interested in that and the language. A lot of language is used to type cast elements, like the word extremist etc. We developed this performance where we played with these roles and we essentially played with language. Leanne developed a set of prose which were fairly poetic and personal. We performed this down at victory square. She was dressed like an activist, yet her narratives were very poetic and very internal. They were contemplative and not strident in the way that typical media presents activists as extremists. And then, me the riot cop character, I compiled some texts based off of speeches from Ghandi and Mother Theresa and did a remix on them and had this authority figure narrative that was self questioning, not necessarily doubting, but kind of debunking the notion that there is a right way of dealing with these situations, this is the way that it has to be. And my character was very much going why, what is happening, what is our life about. So that is kind of the background, and so we had this residency in Bulgaria over the summer we wanted to sort of take these characters to there. When we were there it was year long anniversary of protests that were happening in the streets against the parliament's corruption, they'd been trying to dissolve government, it didn't happen. We were there for the 5th non-confidence vote, but the dissolving never happened. I suppose both of our work is about taking the person and trying to put it out there, or investigating public ways of dialoging. Public Address seemed to be a way of exploring how to broadcast the personal out into the public realm. I think in both our work it is important that we are trying to get to an emotional response, or elicit an emotional response in our viewers or readers, or what ever the audience. And um... yeah, you take it from here...

Leanne: OK, yeah, so we realized that there were issues around language and in Bulgaria, a lot of people do speak english and a lot of the artists are bilingual or multilingual and we wanted to work with a lot of local artists and the book format seemed like a great format to start with. There was a lot of connection between the ideas of, the notion of audience with artist books, small audiences, engaged audiences, interactions that are just as meaningful, even if you have 200 people, or 50 people reading your work it is still meaningful. This doesn't really get addressed in traditional models of publishing. Its kind of, well, within the notion of our culture that small audiences aren't important.

VIA: Something that is very prevalent in so many ways with social media, tweets, followers, klout and so on.

Leanne: We thought it would be a space where we could present multiple voices in multiple formats, and multiple agents. We had works published in Bulgarian, English, but also works produced in French, and Spanish in text. Some of it was translated, some of it wasn't. We were playing with accessibility, inclusiveness, exclusiveness...

VIA: How long were you in Bulgaria for?

Leanne: 2 months. We had a show where we collaborated and showed our artist books and local made artist books and put it around this notion of public address. Part of that was that we wanted to go there and be a part of something in Bulgaria, but also to bring back some of what was happening in Bulgarian artist book culture and bringing this back to Vancouver to share, and the Vancouver Art Book Fair seemed like a great venue to do that. I think that artist publishing is just getting off the ground in bulgaria. It's different. There were a lot of text based publishing that were not in traditional book forms. We worked with graffitti artists, architects, we showed with them, it was a broad range and it was kind of more text based work, but we did bring some of the artist books back. It was interesting it made people want to engage with people in Bulgaria in artist made publishing more than they had before.

Scot: They don't really have much of a zine culture as we do here, they have a history of fine art catalogs, almost everyone who has a show there gets a stack of catalogs. A very formal way of talking about work, but not a lot of in-between or self produced works. We thought it was interesting. They were interested in what formats artists in Canada were working on, and we explained the notion of zines and photocopying etc, and they thought, we could do that. It was good, we learned about what they did, and shared what we did.

VIA: For the VA/BF are you showing some of these publications that are coming out of Bulgaria as well as your work?

Scot: Yeah, we've got some people there who wanted to do something new, so they're working on them and they're sending them, so hopefully we'll get them in time. (laughs)

Leanne: Artist publishing... right. (more laughs)

Scot: We'll be giving a bit of a talk discussing our impressions of that experience and of Bulgaria. And we're going to be launching our book.

Leanne: While we were there I was blogging for Geist about the experience of the residency in Bulgaria. The editors thought that would be interesting. We compiled a journal of the experience of being there, working the show and the artists, documented it and Publication Studios is publishing it and it will be launching at the Vancouver Art Book Fair.

Scot: It's called Monument.

Leanne: Which is a collaboration of work that both Scot and I did while we were in Sofia. Images and text.

VIA: Will you be doing any performance based work at the fair as well?

Scot: No. Absolutely not. (laughs) We could do something but we likely won't have the time to do something or put something together.

VIA: Do you both often work collaboratively together?

Leanne: We've been together for a long time.

Scot: We work sometimes collaboratively, sometimes not.

Leanne: Yes. People seem to want us to collaborate more and more over the years, we would work on each others projects. I come from a more text-based practice and Scot comes from a more visual arts practice, we have somehow managed to meet in the middle. I would edit his work, or he would help me install mine and over the years we would work together on more projects. It wasn't always easy to collaborate. (laughter)

Scot: Still isn't! (more laughs)

Leanne: I think it is getting easier.

Scot: It is getting easier, we both care so much about the same things, but we have very different views about getting to them. It's hard because I know Leanne is heading this way, but I can't see it. She'll look at me and say, What are you doing?, but she'll know that I am getting to the same place, we just have very different ways of getting there. We have our own languages, visual languages, the work always comes out good, but we don't always get along while doing it. (more laughs)

Scot: We did a collaboration last year at Project Space Gallery.

Leanne: Oh, that's right.

Scot: It was kind of a retrospective, we looked at 15 years of text based stuff that we had done either together or separately, we created an installation that was sort of a street hording, we tore up and overlapped and actually once it was all up, a lot of if was separate projects that we had done, some even from before we had known each other, but you can see the connections all the way through, across the years. It was kind of interesting.

Leanne: Yeah, We're always...I think there's a bit social element in our work, maybe not overtly, but it's always there. We spend a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other and then we go and we work on them. The concerns that we have been discussing are all apparent in our work and ultimately we have come to this point where our approach is complimentary, the strength that Scot brings in terms of visualising things, I tend to think of things in terms of text and I am pretty minimalist in my approach. So I think we definitely, collectively, we're stronger.

VIA: Did you participate in last year's book fair?

Leanne: No, but our work has been there through Publication Studio, Verlag Press, so our books have been there, but we haven't done anything, it will be a challenge to be there this year in the space.

VIA: It will be great to see it at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Leanne: It's amazing that the Art Gallery just said, OK, it's so cool that they did.

VIA: It is a great way to connect with artists who feel like they are outside of the VAG, it's a great way of embracing a larger community.

Leanne: Yeah. Artists can say that they've had a show at the Art Gallery, putting that one on the CV for sure! (laughs) It's a very cool place to have it. It is exciting work.

VIA: It is great for that conversation to be happening in that space.