Stephen Perkins, Redux Series: #102, #104, #111, #112, #114, 2024-2025

Four accordions, spray paint and stencil, each work has 18 single-sided pages, individual page 7' 5" x 5", and when unfolded plus the 2 covers 8' 4"

 

Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, Reframing Motherhood, BO Books, 2020

front cover

I'm posting below a review of this really fascinating and ambitious book from the website of Moon, an art book store in Taipei, Taiwan. This book is really a two-in-one, with the first half titled "The Mother as a Creator 2001-2020," and when you get to the end of the book you start the other half which is titled "My Son and I at the Same Height 2002-2020."

Artist Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her practice-based PhD in Art from the University of Brighton in the UK. She is a professional artist and director of Ching Tien Art Space, and also an assistant professor at the Department of Arts and Design at the National Dong Hwa University. 

"The internationally recognized Taiwanese photographer, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, published her first photo book, Reframing Motherhood. With a series of photographs which heavily shows temporality and self-representation, the book comprises two art projects spanning over nearly two decades: The Mother as a Creator and My Son and I at the Same Height. These two projects have documented the photographer’s pregnancy and her son’s growth in the linear progression of time, turning every moment into a precious work that depicts the mother-son bond as they grow together, and writing a history of a mother in constant struggles of facing herself. 

The Mother as a Creator has been displayed as a Taiwanese travelling exhibition and been invited to many large international exhibitions. “In these photos, Wang asserts her active role in the making of another life, reframing motherhood as a grand creative endeavor,” says The New Yorker. “Probably the coolest mother and child photo in the world,” praised by The Chinese publication Portrait Magazine. This project also garners appreciation from BBC who say the project can “change and transcend the cliché of motherhood.” BuzzFeed News from the U.S. see the series of photographs captivating in their impressive and powerful stories and say that they “will challenge your view of the world."

In order to let her two seemingly incompatible identities—being an artist and a mom at the same time—coexist, Annie Wang redefines motherhood in a creative and innovative manner of photobiography as she flips stereotypical maternal images to counter the idea that a mom must sacrifice herself. With its distinctive photography style of mise en abyme, the series of photographs has spanned over two decades and taken in a form of the son trying to stand at the same height as his mom does. Recording the trajectory of aging in each photo taken, the series is seen as an unprecedented work in contemporary art. Collaborating transnationally, Reframing Motherhood is printed in Mandarin, English, and Korean. Its design of an accordion fold book is constructed as an exhibition which allows readers, whether they read it with only one hand or stretch it like an accordion, to travel through photos’ temporality.

Except for the photographer’s artworks and her artist statements, there are also background stories of every single photo written in the back of them. Readers can therefore understand what the artworks bring to them as well as the narrative that represents Annie Wang’s long-term work—both as an artist and as a mom."

39 double-sided pages, individually 10" x 7", when unfolded 22ft 9".

Wang's statement about the project with reflections on the photographs and the different circumstances in which they were taken. Note how she uses previous photographs in the series and layers them with more recent ones, setting up a situation in which they are in dialogue with each other.

cover for the 2nd book

Levi Sherman, The Kink's Gesture, Levi Sherman Designs, 2012

cover

A sharp and compact artists' book accompanied with short clipped snippets of typeset texts spread out across its length — but it left this reader none the wiser as to the true nature of 'the kink's gesture.' But perhaps, all the different display options that the snake book offers with its folds, blind alleys and abrupt transitions is the 'kink' that animates this book.

16 single-sided pages, individually 2.75" x 2.25" and unfolded 1ft 9.25". 

back cover

Takashi Homma, The Ginza Street, Tokyo, Japan, 2019, ed. 500

book with silver slip case

This is the 9th book Homma has created in homage to Ed Ruscha and his contributions to the field of artists' books. Specifically, this book is in homage to Ruscha's "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966) which was also a leporello that used a similar design in order to show every building on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. 

But there is more to this story. Photobook historians have noted the similarity of Ruscha's mapping of Sunset Strip with one in a 1954 pair of books published by the Japanese writer and artist Shohachi Kimura titled "Ginza Haccho", which is a book of photographs by Yoshikazu Suzuki that shows every building on Ginza Street in Tokyo in the same format as Homma's accordion. While Ruscha has demurred about revealing if he was aware of Suzuki's technique for recording both sides of this well-known street in Tokyo, others have also recorded this street in a similar manner. The most recent homage book, prior to Homma's, is Michalis Pilcher's "The Ginza Strip" (2018) that surveys Ginza street using the same technique with both of them adopting the same silver slip covers and formatting. One crucial difference however, is that Pilcher's photographs were taken during the day while Homma's were taken at night, thus inserting his own twist into this game of influence and appropriation one year after Pilcher's.

Pilcher's book can be found on this blog here: 

accordion publications: Michalis Pichler, The Ginza Strip, Kodoji Press: Berlin, Tokyo, 2018

53 pages, individually 7" x 5.5", and when unfolded 24ft 3.5"

Ellen Wallenstein, A Game of Chess, Women's Studio Workshop Print Center, Rosendale, NY, 1986

A work by this photographer and book artist based in New York who recently retired from teaching at Pratt Institute. I'm having a hard time getting the gist of this work that's been made with a plastic camera. A photo of a piece of Roman statuary on its front cover leads into a series of moody and blurry images that seem to be related to this piece of sculpture. Otherwise I'm at a loss to get the message, unless it's connected to some literary reference I'm unaware of (maybe the "Game of Chess" section in T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land", 1922?).

10 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 6", and unfolded 5ft.

reverse side

back cover

Mélanie Corre, Le Chaos, Terry Bleu, Amsterdam, 2024, ed. 300

An accordion that is rooted in a physical place, in this case it's the rocks found around Wrac'h island situated in Brittany, France. The rocks can only be seen at low tide and Corre has carefully depicted over 60 of them in this accordion. Corre has also done a number of other works that explore the subject of the rocks found in this vacation location, indeed this work comes from an exhibition of her's titled “Roch Gored: mapping chaos around the lighthouse.” The landscape also features a lighthouse at the entrance to the estuary and Corre introduces it in this poem about this piece:

Le Chaos

The lighthouse signals us

we are guardians of the coast,

tickled

       by the current

we have a good laugh 

                    underwater

tomorrow, 

     facing the chaos.

For another of Corre's works on the same theme on this blog see: accordion publications: Mélanie Corre, Cascade, Terry Bleu publisher, Amsterdam, 2021, ed. 200

7 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 3.5" and when unfolded 2.5ft

reverse side

back cover

Lucrezia Viperina, Bored Meats, Strane Dizioni, Italy, 2000

                                                                                front cover

Based in Milan, Lucrezia studied at the European Institute of Design (IED) specializing in illustration and animation. Of this strange and compelling accordion the author says, "Bored Meats is the diary of a confined girl. Bored Meats is something we all experienced during the 2020 lockdown."

10 double-sided pages, individually 6.5" x 6.5" and unfolded 5ft 5".

reverse side

back cover

Silvia Rocchi, Serena Schinaia, Roberto Masso & Martín López Lam, Una Giornata Scorsa, Ediciones Valientes, Rome, 2016

    

Una Giornata Scorsa (A Past Day) is a collective work created by 4 artists over a period of five days, between May 30th and June 3rd, 2016, at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. The urban jungle is the central theme with depictions of all the vagaries and unexpected events that take place in these kinds of environments. A silent bespectacled visitor can be seen in some of the pages negotiating this rather hostile environment, with the last frame showing him jumping out of the back of an ambulance into a street littered with overturned and burned out vehicles.

16 single-sided pages, individually 8" x 12" and when fully open 16ft.

front

reverse side

back cover