Exhibitions
Out of Bounds
Summer school for artists' publishing
July 21 - August 28, 2022
Hours: noon to 5pm daily.
Opening Thursday, July 21, 2022 6pm
Out of Bounds is the fifth installment of the Summer School for Artists' Publishing, presented annually by the Libby Leshgold Gallery and READ Books. This year, we have commissioned several artist-publishers to make new or reanimated works that resist the constraints of conventional dissemination, intellectual property restrictions, state censorship, and economic barriers to reach or form new publics and counterpublics. These works belong to a wider field of publishing that includes unauthorized copies, facsimiles, activist tools and manuals, anarchist cookbooks, anonymous leaflets, banned or suppressed books, street posters, and samizdats.
Some of the publications in this exhibition are available free in the gallery; others are for sale for a nominal price through READ Books.
66B has created a new edition of the 1976 book Instant Furniture: Low-cost, Well-designed, Easy-to-assemble Tables, Chairs, Couches, Beds, Desks, and Storage Systems, a do-it-yourself manual of furniture designs by notable international architects including Carlo Scarpa, Enzo Mari, Garrit T. Reitveld, and Kazuhide Takahama, edited by Peter Stamberg, who also contributed his designs to the compendium. Despite the copyright warnings, the book was widely shared and openly distributed by photocopy amongst artist squat communities in Berlin, Rome, and Amsterdam (and many others) where artists constructed their own living spaces within abandoned buildings during shortages of affordable housing. Long out of print, copies typically sell for hundreds of dollars online; this edition will be sold for the original 1976 cover price, $7.95.
aqui Thami has created a poster campaign, a woman was harassed here, which is part of an ongoing street art project. As a young indigenous woman aqui experiences harassment on a near-daily basis, just like the women she knows, cares for and works with. By wheat-pasting posters in vivid pink on city walls, aqui marks the places where she or the women she knows has experienced harassment. The pink posters bear the uncomfortable testimony, “A WOMAN WAS HARASSED HERE.” aqui began this project to engage women in a discourse on harassment, by marking these spaces in vivid pink, highlighting the pervasiveness of harassment against women.
Juan Cisneros Neumann/Tortilla Press presents a newspaper project, La Mancha. Often referred to as the place of birth of Don Quijote, La Mancha stands for any town anywhere. A stain is called mancha in Spanish; something caused by accident or an accumulation of matter in one specific spot over time. In drawing practice one starts a drawing by staining paper (or any surface) to get a sense of direction, similar to the production of a painting. There also exist stained moments in a culture’s identity and history that time is not able to wash away or hide behind gestures.
Crisis Editions, an imprint of Vancouver artist/designer Robin N., has created a new version of CRISIS READER Vol. 1 - Reader on Intersection and Manifestations of Crime and Capital, a reader compilation of texts revolving around the idea of “manifestation and intersection of crime and capital”. The texts document real events and phenomena, each text is augmented with additional research in the form of photos.
Peripheral Review has commissioned a publication by Liz Knox, with a forward by Nathan Crompton. The Anarchist Review is a conceptual response to the infamously banned Anarchist Cookbook (1971). Artist Knox has compiled various online customer reviews of the original book, complemented with an introductory essay on the history of the Cookbook and its place in contemporary society, by activist and scholar Crompton.
Hotam Press presents Hong Kong, 2019 - 2021, a collection of the slogans and sayings popularized in the pro-democratic movement in Hong Kong from 2019 to 2021, a period when the city was seized by political conflicts and state repression. All graphics and calligraphy were found on actual protest signs, banners, flags, graffiti, printed matters, postings on social media, and tattoos worn by protesters. Using the form of a newspaper is a tribute to Apple Daily, the last liberal newspaper in Hong Kong, which was forced to close its operation after several personnel (including the owner, executives and editors) were arrested and assets were seized in June 2021.
Rachel Lau has made Sorry, We’re Open, an ugly hand-bound compilation of text and images documenting gentrification in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
pensamientos en la frontera is an ongoing project compiled by andi and collaboratively riso printed and published with Moniker Press. It consists of a continuously growing bundle of publications and prints that feature many perspectives on displacement and borders. It comes as a new generation of Nicaraguan youth are forced into immigration, to create bridges to connect culture-specific ways forced movement is carried in language, image, and sense of home across cultures. The newest addition is a call to action as more people exercising their right of movement and seeking refuge are met by the violence of border regimes; six months, 111,000 migrants, raided newspapers, swimming lessons for the Rio Grande.
66B is a publisher formerly located in Edmonton and Lethbridge, Alberta and now based in Vancouver, operated by curator, editor, and writer Kristy Trinier. Part of the international Publication Studio network, 66B uses commonly available materials and equipment to produce books on-demand by both emerging and established artists and writers.
andi is an artist, researcher and facilitator with ties and responsibilities to Nicaragua and Central America, and to BIPOC and immigrant communities in Canada and abroad. Her practice observes modes of belonging and resistance, searching for possibilities within tensions. She incorporates elements of social science, feminism, queer theory and ecology to her interdisciplinary practice in photography, video, installation and writing. She holds a BFA in Visual Art (SFU 2017), and has continued her education through the BCAC’s Early Career Development Grant (2019) alongside mentors Gloria Carrion and Althea Thauberger to forward a transnational visual storytelling practice focused on grief and healing.
aqui Thami is a Janajati/Indigenous artist from the Himalayas, living and working in Bombay. aqui uses social exchanges and develops safe spaces to position art as a medium of healing in community. aqui's interdisciplinary practice ranges across ceremonial interventions, performances, drawings, zinemaking, fly posting, public intervention, brought together by participant involvement most of her work is self funded and realised in collaboration.
Hotam is an independent press founded by artist Ho Tam. The press has been creating artists’ books and zines since the 1990s. All projects are created independently from conception and design to production and distribution.
Juan Cisneros Neumann graduated in 2016 from Emily Carr University as a bachelor of visual arts. He attended Capilano University during the foundation years of his degree and was part of the last class of Capilano’s Studio Arts program. He lives and works in constant assimilation in the city of Vancouver experimenting with publications and its repercussions. His imprint, Tortilla Press, utilizes the newspaper format as an abandoned medium floating in the limbo of existence. The content collected inside the papers consists of material upcycled from public visual media (both Canadian and International), historical footage, comic books, documentary films, motion pictures, cell phone videos, screengrabs, art books, YouTube and pretty much any visual material that is available at the Vancouver Public Library. The project as a publishing idea looks to incorporate into local Canadian art the language of rejection, irrelevance and the use of localized information as a means of constructing new understandings; and explores possible ramifications of meaning within local communities.
Liz Knox uses conceptual strategies to examine systems of interpretation with an emphasis on irony. Language is the most common thread in her work, and a regular starting point is found text. Projects are often the result of deep dives into obscure archives and other Google holes. Endurance plays a large role in Knox’s practice and has seeped into her personal life in the form of distance running. Most of her works exist as conceptual portraits that employ endurance and fulfill rigorous research. Knox studied Studio Art at the University of Guelph and completed her MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, in 2013. She is an artist based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. In addition to her work in Out of Bounds, her video Infinite Scroll is currently showing on Emily Carr University’s Urban Screen.
Moniker Press is a risograph print and publishing studio that works collaboratively with artists and writers to produce small editions of books, zines and print ephemera. Located in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Nathan Crompton is a writer, housing activist, and editor at The Mainlander. He lives and works in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Founded in 2016, Peripheral Review is a platform for documenting and expanding the emerging and under-represented Canadian art scene, as well as enabling access for emerging writers by encouraging expanded and accessible critical dialogue.
Rachel Lau is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and radio producer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, colonially known as “Vancouver”. Inspired by the tenderness and strength of queer and racialized communities, they create work that embraces feeling and communality. Their current practice includes sound art, poetry, photography, drawing, and zine-making. With friends, they organize Queer Reads Library, a mobile library of queer books and zines based in Hong Kong and Vancouver.
Robin Netherton (Robin N.) is a Vancouver-based graphic artist and designer, he graduated from Emily Carr in 2020 with a Bachelor in Visual Art and a Minor in Art + Text. Robin is the founder of the publishing imprint Crisis Editions. Crisis Editions regularly appears in artist book fairs locally and internationally and titles are carried at select specialty bookstores. It has the goal of reproducing and recirculating unprinted, out-of-print or otherwise hard to find archival materials. Crisis Editions seeks to generate real knowledge through reproduction.
Image: Ho Tam, detail from Hong Kong 2019-2021 (2022)
