Artists' Books

This week’s featured Artist Book is Public Access, by David Horvitz and Ed Steck.

In 2010/11, David Horvitz drove up the Pacific Coast highway, travelling the entire length of the California Coast. During his trip, Horvitz photographed the Pacific Ocean from about 50 different coastal vantages. The artist appears in each image, back to the camera, facing the sea. These images were then added to the Wikipedia articles pertaining to each specific beach. His intent, he writes, “was that these images would begin to circulate in this public place as visual information surrounding the geographic location, as a kind of meta-date for the locations.” During the project, Horvitz also wanted to play with ideas of omniprescence and remoteness – the omniprescence of the Internet and the remote locations that he photographed. The project spurred a series of conversations between various Wikipedia editors about the legitimacy of the images, resulting in many of them being taken down.

Public Access contains each of David Horvitz’ photographs with scans of the accompanying Wikipedia articles, as well as the online discussions between the Wikipedia editors regarding the photos. The book concludes with poetry by Ed Steck. It was published in 2011 by Portland’s Publication Studio, in conjunction with the exhibition As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration.

Click here to access more information about Public Access through the library catalogue

Founded in 2009 in Portland, Publication Studio is run by Patricia No and Antonia Pinter. No and Pinter will be speaking this Sunday at 1 PM, as part of Vancouver’s Art/Book Fair.

Click here to access more information about the Vancouver Art/Book Fair

Along with presentations, performances, and installations, the Vancouver Art/Book Fair features almost one hundred publishers of books, magazines, zines, printed ephemera and digital or other experimental forms of publication. It is the only international art book fair in Canada. Emily Carr will be participating too, so be sure to check it out!