READ Books

Building on a season spent on the West Coast in Portland and Vancouver, A Fall documents a series of performances, talks and installations from New York-based artist Autumn Knight’s interdisciplinary practice. An experiment in form, the publication features a collection of the artist’s drawings, scripts from the ongoing performance series Notes on Nothing, and a ‘dossier’ of indexical references, texts and essays. A public launch will be presented in Spring 2026, with the artist in attendance.

With texts by Autumn Knight, Kristan Kennedy and Vanessa Kwan.

Worlds Beyond Our Words is an artist book produced as part of Hong-Kai Wang’s installation part of an exhibition A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place at the Taichung Art Museum opening in December 2025. This work will be shown at Libby Leshgold Gallery in 2026.

With texts by Haytham el-Wardany, Phoebe Giannisi, Gavin Steingo, Hong-Kai Wang, and Matariki Williams.

Co-published with Taichung Art Museum, Taiwan.

Published by ECU Press/Reflector

ECU Press is pleased to launch The Undesirables by Myfanwy Macleod. Featuring work drawn from MacLeod’s public art endeavors over the past fifteen years, The Undesirables includes realized and unrealized projects as well as propositional ideas. The Undesirables includes a newly commissioned text by Lisa Robertson.

The second book in ECU Press’s Reflector series, TEMPER: one hundred brief missives within a character limit springs from an ongoing online project by Laiwan, in which the artist uses the constraints and possibilities of social media to deliver mini-manifestoes on liberation, doubt, activism, privilege, environmental degradation, protest, racism, and art. TEMPER chooses key moments from this stream of contemplation and provocation from 2019 to 2021 and re-presents them in print, accompanied by Bopha Chhay’s essay “Keeping Doom at the Edges.”

Published by ECU Press/Reflector.

The first book in ECU Press’s Reflector series, Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye.

Published by ECU Press and Libby Leshgold Gallery.

A monograph on the work of Inuvialuit contemporary artist Maureen Gruben, with texts by Kyra Kordoski, Tarah Hogue, Tania Willard, and Cate Rimmer.

Published by ECU Press and Primary Information.

Live from the Commodore Ballroom captures a legendary performance by UJ3RK5 in Vancouver in 1980. Sharing an affinity with bands such as Devo and Talking Heads, UJ3RK5 emerged out of punk, new wave, and post-punk music, as well as the Vancouver School of photo conceptualism that some of the members were associated with. The band included artists Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace among others, and while at the time the band eschewed the art- band label, their subject matter, approach, and visual identity intersected vividly with those of the Vancouver art scene at the time. Wall noted in a 1980 interview: “UJ3RK5 is recreated from art.”

This live performance is famous in the Vancouver music scene (as well as in visual art circles) and this double LP documents the band at their peak live intensity, opening for Gang of Four, shortly before they disbanded.Taken from the sound board at the Commodore Ballroom, the recording includes “Naum Gabo,” “The Anglican,” “Booty Dread,” and the Dan Graham-inspired “Eisenhower and the Hippies,” as well as eight other previously unreleased tracks.

Formed in Vancouver in 1978, UJ3RK5 originated out of the guitar and bongo duo The Gentlemen Two, comprised of Frank Ramirez and Rodney Graham. The band’s line-up included Kitty Byrne (drums), Rodney Graham (guitar), Colin Griffiths, aka Frank Crass (guitar), Danice MacLeod (violin), Frank Johnson, aka Frank Ramirez (vocals), Jeff Wall (vocals, keyboards), Ian Wallace (bass), and David Wisdom (vocals, keyboards), with occasional participation by friends such as Merv Hutchinson and author William Gibson. In addition to appearing on Canadian compilations, in 1980 the band released a self-titled, four-song EP on Quintessence Records. The record was reissued that same year by PolyGram, only a few months before the band broke up due to the growing visual arts careers of several of its members.

Published by ECU Press and Publication Studio Vancouver, in partnership with Art Metropole.

A three-volume set consisting of hundreds of Garry Neill Kennedy’s notes, plans and doodles produced during one decade at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The publication presents an accumulation of ten years worth of plans, from the late 1970s to the late 80s, for future artworks and installations, including exhibitions that occurred and ones that never transpired. These sketches are situated together with draft letters to faculty, outlines for meeting agendas and doodles documenting dreaming and boredom alongside NSCAD business.

Published by ECU Press and Charles H. Scott Gallery.

A new monograph on the works of Vancouver artist Neil Wedman featuring texts by Patrik Andersson, Brady Cranfield and Kate Noble.

Edited by Kathy Slade

Co-published by ECU Press, Les presses du réel, and JRP|Ringier

The texts presented in this volume span the years 1967 to 2011 and articulate ideas around a broad range of topics including conceptual art, minimalism, architecture and design, and reflect Dan Graham’s long-standing interest in structures of knowledge, systems of representation, and modes of interaction or self-perception for the viewer. The book includes essays on the work of Carl Andre, Atelier Bow Wow, John Chamberlain, Joe Colombo, Darcy Lange, Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Wall, and Peter Zumthor, and features an extensive interview with Itsuko Hasegawa in which the Japanese architect’s major public works are discussed in relation to Graham’s recent glass and mirror structures.

Dan Graham (born in 1942, lives in New York City), is a highly influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both as a practitioner and as a well-respected critic and theorist. He was the founding director of the John Daniels Gallery (1964–1965), where he presented Sol LeWitt’s first solo exhibition and works by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Smithson. Graham is known for his early conceptual work for magazines, his groundbreaking video work, and his site-specific architectural pavilions.

Edited by David MacWilliam.

Co-published by Visual Aids (New York) and ECU Press in the Pile Driver Editions Series.

In 1993, music loving Steve Busby died of an AIDS-related illness, leaving an eclectic record collection to his sister, artist Cathy Busby. After 18 years of keeping the collection, Cathy organized a one-night celebration and album give away. The one-night only event is now a book, Steve’s Vinyl, with writing from Steve and Cathy, photos from the album give-away, and memories of Steve collected the night of the event. Like the event itself, the book is a tribute to Steve and his varied tastes in music, men, and identities and a way of activating the collection as music and graphics.

Cathy Busby is an artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has exhibited her large-scale installations and printed matter in Canada and internationally. She was recently artist-in-residence with the Institute of Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, New York and then at Emily Carr. She has been a visiting researcher with a Fulbright Fellowship at New York University and she is currently a visiting professor at the University British Columbia.

Edited by Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECU Press, Les presses du réel, and JRP|Ringier.

After Euphoria is a collection of Jeff Derksen’s writings on art, architecture, and globalism. The selected essays in this book focus on artistic practices and modes of cultural critique that aim their questions, research, and propositions at neoliberalism’s alliance of the economy, affect, and the present. After Euphoria includes essays on the work of Brian Jungen, Sam Durant, Andrea Geyer, Jin-me Yoon, Ken Lum, Ron Terada, Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber, and Alfredo Jaar.

Jeff Dersken is a writer, poet, and critic based in Vancouver and Vienna. His on-going research investigates the effect of globalization on the production and experience of culture. Derksen’s critical writing has appeared in Springerin, Archis, Open Letter, Camera Austria, C Magazine, and Hunch. He is the editor of the literary journal Line and is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run center, The Kootenay School of Writing.

Edited by Lionel Bovier.

Co-published by ECU Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

This book focuses on John Armleder’s early Fluxus-related works with Ecart, a group he founded in 1969 with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner. Between 1972 and 1980, Ecart established itself as both bookshop and gallery in Geneva and exhibited, among others, Giuseppe Chiari, Braco Dimitrijevic, Dick Higgins, Manon, Annette Messager, Ben, Olivier Mosset, Daniel Spoerri. At the same time, Ecart published books and editions by Robert Filliou, Peter Downsborough, Sarkis, Genesis P-Orridge, Endre Tót, Dan Graham, Maurizio Nannucci, and Lawrence Weiner. Ecart’s rich and multifaceted production, which also included festivals of performance, made it into one of the most important groups and alternative spaces of its time in Europe.

Edited by Cate Rimmer and Kathy Slade.

Published by ECU Press and Charles H. Scott Gallery.

This volume documents Germaine Koh’s large-scale installation work titled Fallow, in both its public presentations in Vancouver, at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, and Berlin, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. In Fallow, plants and groundcover from an urban lot have been transplanted into the gallery, completely filling the exhibition space. The sense of disuse and non-productivity associated with vacant lots is transformed through this process of relocation. What was once identified as a void within the landscape of urban development is ascribed with new use value. As Koh says, “Although withdrawn from ‘constructive’ use, the space is far from empty, but rather full of richly non-productive time and process.”

Germaine Koh’s site-responsive projects have been shown at numerous galleries internationally including the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The British Museum in the UK, De Appel in the Netherlands, Art Forum Berlin and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

Edited by Rita McBride.

Co-published by ECU Press, Potter Press, and JRP|Ringier in the
Christoph Keller Series.

Rita McBride is a prominent American artist based in Düsseldorf, whose sculptures and installations deal with fiction and public space and often provide a set for performances and lectures. She has edited a series of books for which she invited other artists and writers to write short stories involving constraints and a relationship to the art world. Each of the books corresponds to a sub literary genre (crime novels, science fiction, romance, and self-help).

WestWays is the fifth in Rita McBride’s continuing Ways series of collaborative novels, this time with writer and climber Matthew Licht. We follow Mae West from her childhood in 19th-century Brooklyn through her adventures with W.C. Fields at the 1931 Oktoberfest to a Sapphic encounter with Leni Riefenstahl on a safari in the 1970s, picking up a fighter pilot, Salvador Dalí, and Billy Wilder for the ride. Published to coincide with the completion of McBride’s 52-meter-high Mae West public commission at Munich’s Effnerplatz, the artist’s Mae West is an actress, inflatable vest, sculpture, exhibition, and now finally a book.

Edited by Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECU Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and Cooley Gallery.

This is the first monograph published on the work of Canadian artist Elspeth Pratt that spans her career to date. For twenty-eight years Pratt has been producing sculptural work that negotiates the line between abstraction and representation to explore architecture and public space. Working with everyday “impoverished materials, the artist engages with ideas of doubt, the precarious, and the built environment.

Elspeth Pratt has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for three decades. Recent exhibitions include Second Date, a large-scale public art project at Off Site commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery and Nonetheless at the Cooley Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She teaches at Simon Fraser University where she is Associate Director of the School for Contemporary Arts. Pratt is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

The monograph includes texts by Lorna Brown, Lisa Robertson, Bitter/Webber, Matthew Stadler, Oliver Neumann, and Stephanie Snyder with a foreword by Kathy Slade.

Edited by Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECU Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

Odessa Staircase Redux is a retroactive storyboard for Sergei Eisenstein’s montage sequence from The Battleship Potemkin. The first frame of every cut in the scene is re-drawn in black ink. The ensuing series of 158 drawings form a flipbook version of the film scene that highlights the vast number of cuts and the juxtapositions between neighboring shots. An accompanying booklet of archival films stills depicting a protest by UC Berkeley students against a House Un-American Committee meeting at San Francisco City Hall in 1961.

Kota Ezawa depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography, and popular culture and re-presents them as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes, and prints. The work’s paired down minimalist aesthetic helps to streamline Ezawa’s focus on the changing role of the camera and its effect on the viewers reception.

Kota Ezawa is a German Japanese artist born in Cologne and currently based in San Francisco. He has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, St Louis Art Museum, The Hayward Gallery in London, and the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver. His work is included in numerous public collections including Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Ezawa is represented by Murray Guy in New York, Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, and Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt.

Edited by David MacWilliam.

Published by ECU Press in the Pile Driver Editions Series.

Sensory Maps is a series of drawings by Finland-based artist Anna Ruth. The drawings record the artist’s travels and the movement of Vancouver buses over the course of a day, January 26, 2009, and were composed by allowing the vibrations of the vehicle to move a hand-held pen across a sheet of paper.

Anna Ruth grew up in Vancouver and is now living and working in Jyväskylä, Finland. She studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in the mid-1990s and graduated from l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Cornouaille in France in 1998. She exhibits her artwork internationally.

Sensory Maps is the first book in Pile Driver Editions, a new imprint of the ECU Press. Pile Driver focuses on books by artists and writers associated with the University.

Essays by Jan Verwoert and Monika Szewczyk.

Published by ECU Press.

“On the beauty of being bold, not blunt, and the audacity of realizing, in painting, that modernists were wrong to think that modernism was all about finding something final, but that, in effect, modernism much rather is about facing its challenges again, every day, in painting, in a manner that may be bold, not blunt, and, despite some agony, occasionally most joyful”
— Jan Verwoert

Through her work, McIntosh responds to Modernism, and specifically geometric abstraction, resisting the reverent nature of pure abstraction, through the constant tweaking of very subtle details.

This first monograph of Vancouver-based painter Elizabeth McIntosh features essays by Berlin based writer and critic Jan Verwoert, and Monika Szewczyk, head of publications for the Witte de With Centre for International Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

Elizabeth McIntosh has been producing and exhibiting paintings since the mid-nineties. She has exhibited widely in Canada and shown internationally. Her work resides in collections such as the National Gallery of Canada. McIntosh is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

Edited by Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

Visible Heavens from 1850–2008 is an artist book based on a found star map from 1850. The “original” map was photocopied and each subsequent copy was then re-photocopied. The artist likens the slow degradation of the image to the cultural shift within our interpretation of the stars (constellation charts were called maps of the heavens but after 1975 they became known as maps of the sky) and each photocopy represents a year in the decline from “heaven” to “earth”. From start to finish the map changes from an “accurate” vision of the stars above to an abstracted blackness depicting the new “heaven” in the year 2008.

Andrew Dadson is an emerging Vancouver-based artist. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery and has been included in group exhibitions in the US, China and Europe. Dadson is represented by Galleria Franco Noero in Turin, Italy.

Edited by Euan Macdonald.

Co-published by ECI Press, JRP|Ringier, and Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg.

Selected Standards is an artist book that combines title pages from sheet music found in a second hand store in Los Angeles with drawings and aerial photographs of LA. The represented songs are hits from jazz musicals from the 1940s and 1950s and they range in theme from zany and wistful, to melancholic and existential. Some are well-known standards, while others are obscure. The song titles contain philosophical moments, familiar and peripheral experiences, some imagining a better world or offering a fleeting chance to escape the one we’re in. When he first encountered the sheet music, Macdonald was intrigued by the narrative relationship that developed between the titles. With the exception of an addition, the title pages are presented in the order in which they were originally found. In the spirit of improvisation and free association, closely linked with jazz, Macdonald paired each song with drawings made in his studio as well as with aerial photographs of Los Angeles.

Euan Macdonald is a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles. He shows with Michael Zink Gallery in Munich, Galleria S.A.L.E.S. in Rome, Cohan and Leslie in New York, Jack Hanley in San Francisco, and Tracey Lawrence Gallery in Vancouver.

Edited by Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

This is the Only Living I’ve Got (Don’t Take It Away From Me): The Rodney Graham Songbook is a compilation of 37 songs from Graham’s CDs and records including The Bed Bug, Love Buzz, And Other Short Songs in the Popular Idiom, Getting it Together in the Country, Rock is Hard, and Never Tell a Pal a Hard Luck Story.

Graham’s songs are transcribed into sheet music with musical notation for piano, guitar tablature and lyrics. Taking the form of a popular songbook, the book features images of the artist, his band, and new artwork. In addition the book contains a CD compilation of rare cover songs with two brand new tracks.

Vancouver artist Rodney Graham is an internationally acclaimed artist. He is known for literary and conceptual artworks, cinematic installations, costume dramas, and also as a singer-songwriter. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with projects such as Parsifal Score, Parsifal (1882-38,969,364,735), and School of Velocity, Graham began to make artworks whose central subject was music or the concrete objects of music such as musical scores and CDs. Since then, the line between his visual art practice and his music practice has become blurred and eventually conflates in works such as How I Became a Ramblin Man, Zabriskie Point and The Phonokinetoscope.

Edited by Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

Aunt Maud is a tertiary character from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel, Pale Fire. Little is known about Aunt Maud, she is described as a mediocre painter and scrapbook artist. Sydney Hermant creates a new life for this fictitious character by making Aunt Maud’s Scrapbook in the form of an artist book. The development of the scrapbook is guided by events within the novel’s narrative, historical events that occurred during Nabakov’s writing of the novel, and events culled from Nabokov’s biography. Hermant takes us on a fractured reimagining of the life of Aunt Maud that winds through the Luddite Rebellion, oil crises in the Middle East, and a full-on Merman formal ball.

Sydney Hermant is a Vancouver based artist, writer and curator. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2000 her work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and in Tokyo. She has a BA in literature from Dalhousie University (1993) and studied at the Ecole Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1999). She was the Director/Curator of the Or Gallery from 2002 to 2005.

Edited by Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

This collaborative project by Mark Soo and Tim Lee formally pushes the boundaries of what a book is. The book is blank except for four printed pages containing the text ‘Think’, ‘Fast’, ‘Hip’, and ‘pies’ set in Univers. Focusing on the year 1968, the artists pull seemingly disparate events together. 1968 was an important year in hippie subculture and it was also around this time that Bruce Nauman made his seminal piece Pay Attention Fucker and the year Dan Graham wrote Eisenhower and the Hippies.

Tim Lee is a Vancouver artist with a growing international reputation. Since graduating from UBC in 2002, Lee has shown his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, the National Gallery in Prague, the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montréal, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Belgium. He has had solo exhibitions at the Or Gallery, YYZ in Toronto, Cohan and Leslie in New York, the Lisson Gallery in London, and Tracey Lawrence Gallery. Lee’s work is included in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London.

Mark Soo graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 2001. Since then, he has exhibited locally and internationally in group exhibitions at the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University in New York, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Westspace in Melbourne, the Western Front in Vancouver, and Cohan and Leslie in New York.

Edited by Brady Cranfield, Christoph Keller, and Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

The Music Appreciation Society Presents: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is a CD compilation of songs recorded by local artists who are in bands and who use music in their practice. This project will make reference to the profound role popular music has played in the work of Vancouver artists in recent years. Contributing artists include: U-J3RK5 (a legendary Vancouver new wave band that includes Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace as members), The Rodney Graham Band, Hello Blue Roses (Sydney Hermant and Daniel Bejar), Pink Mountaintops, The Book of Lists, Kevin Schmidt, Damian Moppet, and more.