dm contemporary

dm contemporary NYC is pleased to present bound / unbound: unique and small edition artists' books, an exhibition of over 40 books created by sixteen contemporary artists from around the US and the UK. This is the gallery's first exhibition dedicated solely to the book as an art form. Coinciding with the E/AB Fair and New York Print Week, it opens on Friday, November 6th, and continues through December 19th, 2015. The artists featured are: Ann Aspinwall, Karen Bleitz, Mandy Bonnell, Tracey Bush, Helen Douglas, Elizabeth Duffy, Mary Judge, Zoe Keramea, Kumi Korf, Matthew Langley, Melissa Meyer, Anne Rook, Karen Schiff, Ruth Scott Blackson, Steve Stankiewicz, and Leslie Wayne.

The artists' books exhibited are eclectic, ranging in subject matter from the very personal to themes exploring animal cloning, globalization of the food industry, and environmental issues. And while nature is a major source of inspiration for many of the artists, medieval manuscripts, literature, philosophy, religion, and the immediate surroundings - including neighborhoods, and everyday objects - provide a good source of inspiration for others. The Victorian tradition of observing , recording, collecting specimens, and methodically cataloguing is alive and well, however, the objects of interest for these contemporary book artists are diverse, and the goals of the collections are varied– some raising awareness through humor and others sounding an alarm on the very act of collecting especially when it comes to fragile specimens. In some cases the books are directly related and are an extension of – or a change of direction in – the artist's non-book art practice. Even the structure of the book, in some cases, becomes a metaphor for its subject. Beyond content, a wide range of formats, media, and methods are used in the making of these books, including letterpress, intaglio, inkjet, watercolor, jig-saw and hand cutting, monoprint, collage, gouache, graphite and ink drawing. The papers and the bindings are equally diverse.

Collaboration between artist and publisher is common in creating artists' books. By the same token many artists are involved with their books every step of the way. Many of these books have found their way into major library and museum collections such as Yale Center for British Art, Harvard, Stanford, New York Public Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, MOMA Library, Tate Library, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, to name a few. Full biographical information on the artists is available through the gallery.

Ann Aspinwall received her MA in art history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 1998, and studied printmaking at studios in Scotland and Italy. She has previously worked as a master printer at Pace Editions in New York and as a Print Specialist at the New York Public Library. In 2012 Aspinwall and Knut Willich founded Aspinwall Editions, a fine art print publisher and print studio with facilities in New York and Rheine, Germany. Aspinwall's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the New York Public Library, and the Smith College Museum of Art.

Born in California in 1973, Karen Bleitz has been creating book works in England since 1997. Her works are included in many important institutional libraries and collections, including The Arts Library (UCLA, Los Angeles, CA), The British Library (London, UK), The Butler Library (Columbia University, New York, NY), The Green Library (Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA), Jack Ginsberg Collection of Book Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa), Nabi Art Center Collection (Seoul, Korea), RISD Library (Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI), Samuel Paley Library (Temple University, Philadelphia, PA), University of the Arts London Collection (London, UK), and the Yale Center for British Art (Yale, New Haven, CT), to name a few.

Mandy Bonnell was born in the UK, and trained at Gloucester College of Art and the Royal College of Art, where she attained an MA in Printmaking. Bonnell has had over a dozen solo exhibitions, including the RaMoma, Museum of Modern Art, Nairobi and four shows with the Eagle Gallery. Her work is held in many public collections including Ashmoleum Museum, Oxford; British Council, Kenya; British High Commission, Nairobi; British Library: Modern British Collections; Berry and Coutts Co., London; Fidelity, London; Fitch and Co., London; RaMoma, Museum of Modern Art, Kenya; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Center of British Art.

Tracey Bush is a British artist who works with paper. Her work is featured in many National and International collections including the Tate Gallery Library, the Yale Centre for British Art, and the Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University. Her artworks have been featured in many magazines including Elle Decoration, Grazia Casa, Garageland Magazine, the Sunday Times Style Magazine, Living Etc and Time Out.

Helen Douglas has been at the forefront of Artists' Book making since the early 1970s, publishing under the imprint Weproductions. Also published by Nexus Press and Visual Studies Workshop (US), Pocketbooks and Tate (UK), her books and scrolls engage with structure, photography, printing and the digital to develop visual narrative and encourage new ways of reading. Her work is widely distributed and exhibited in Europe and the US, was featured in MOMA's 2006 exhibition "Eye on Europe: Prints Books and Multiples 1960 and is held in many public collections. Douglas has won numerous awards including the Atlanta Book Prize in 2001(Wild Wood) and the Birgit Skiold Memorial Trust Award for excellence, LAB 2004 (Illiers Combray), LAB 2006 (Swan Songs with damselflies). Douglas lectures at Camberwell, University of the Arts London, and in 2011/12 was a member of the Tate/UAL Research network investigating the Artist book and the Digital Transforming Artist Books. She lives and works in Yarrow, Scottish Borders.

Elizabeth Duffy lives and works in Providence, RI, Acworth, NH and Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College and studied art at the New York Studio School, Hunter College and Rutgers College. Her work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the Drawing Center, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, and The Islip Museum. Residencies include: the Bogliasco Foundation/Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities (Italy), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and in 2013, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Duffy's work is in the collections in numerous public and private collections. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art News, Art on Paper, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She currently teaches Art at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

Mary Judge was raised in rural New Jersey and attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, (BFA), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine and Tyler School of Art (MFA) graduating from the Rome campus. Her works are included in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Fogg Art Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Cassino, Italy. She currently divides her time between Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she is Owner/Director of Schema Projects, a gallery dedicated to art on paper and St Louis Missouri, where she maintains her studio and lives with her husband, architect Gyo Obata.

Zoe Keramea lives and works in Athens, Greece and New York City. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, Kouros Gallery, Dietzspace, Tenri Cultural Institute, and The Drawing Center in New York City. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1989 to work on her printmaking project "Two Stage Intaglio Matrix Prints - Zoetypes" in New York.

Kumi Korf was born in Tokyo, Japan, studied architecture at Tokyo University of Fine Arts, and subsequently received her MFA degree in printmaking from Cornell University. Korf's earliest artists' books were exhibited at the Center for Book Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in 1986, and she apprenticed at Dieu Donné Papermill in 1987, developing a unique technique to create works using kozo fiber with inclusions of printed paper, cloth, threads, and pigmented linen pulp. Following the receipt of a fellowship at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in 1990, Korf taught workshops on artists' books at many institutions: The Center for the Book Arts in New York City, San Francisco Center for the Book, Women's Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT, as well as at many colleges and universities. Her works are included in many public and private collections, including the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Library, and Getty Center Research Library.

Originally from Alexandria, Virginia, Matthew Langley currently lives and works in New York. Langley studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and received a BFA from The Corcoran School of Art. His work has been exhibited extensively in venues, such as Axom Gallery (Rochester, NY), Susan Calloway Fine Art (Washington DC), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Pocket Utopia (Brooklyn), The Delaplaine Arts Center (Frederick, Maryland), and Blank Space (New York City). He has been featured and his work reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Washington Post, and The Washington Citypaper, among others. He lives and works in New York City.

Melissa Meyer received both a BS and an MA from New York University. She is represented by Lennon Weinberg Gallery in New York. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland. Her work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum and many other public and private collections across the United States. Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.

Anne Rook was born in Paris, France in 1945. She received a B.A. Hons. in the History of Art with Honors from the University of London, a Fine Art Degree from Byam Shaw School of Art (London), and a M.A. in Art Theory from Chelsea College (London). Recent exhibitions include 'Spontaneous Cities' Bank Street Arts, Sheffield [solo]; 'From Book to Book', Leeds Art Gallery; 'Another Forest', Artislong Gallery, Kyoto, Japan; International Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana. Winner of Bank Street Art Jury Book prize Sheffield in 2009. Her books are in the collection of the V & A, Tate Gallery, Yale Centre for British Art and the Poetry Library, London.

Karen Schiff was born in New Haven, CT. She received a BA/MA degree from Brown University in 1989, a MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998; and a MFA in studio art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University in 2006. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at dm contemporary, Danese Gallery, Jason Rulnick Gallery, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland), and many others, and it has been reviewed in many publications, such as Art Papers, Art New England, the Boston Globe, Kunstforum International, and artscope. Schiff is also an art writer, whose writings have been published in numerous art publications, including Art in America, and Art Journal. She lives and works in New York City.

Ruth Scott Blackson studied at Norwich University of the Arts, The University of Sunderland and Goldsmiths College, London. In 2006 and 2009 she was successful in obtaining an English Arts Council award for projects, which culminated in residencies and exhibitions hosted in St. Petersburg and France. In 2009 her work was included in the Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory, New Museum, PHAIDON. More recently she was a recipient of the Hidden City Festival commission in collaboration with The Philadelphia Athenaeum.

Steve Stankiewicz was born in Boston and grew up in Chicago. He received a BA degree in sociology from the University of Connecticut in 1979, and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1982. He worked at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in New York from 1982 until 1989, then at his own studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn until moving to Easthampton, Massachusetts in 2010. Since 1992, he has focused on making artists' books of twenty to thirty etchings based on a single theme. The books are in selected collections including The Mississippi Museum of Fine Arts, The New York Public Library, and the Mortimer Rare Book Room, in Northampton, MASS. He is also the winner of the 2002 Faux Faulkner Literary Prize.

Leslie Wayne was born in Germany in 1953, and grew up in California. She currently lives and works in New York. Wayne studied painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1971 to 1973, and she received a BFA in sculpture at The Parsons School of Design. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant (2012), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (2006), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Artists Grant (1994), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist¹s Grant (1985). Wayne's works are a part of various public collections such as the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon, the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida, the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico, and le Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, France. Several of these works from the le Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, France are currently on view at Exposition D'Automne at the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez, Château Labottière, Bordeaux, France, September 12, 2015 – March 6, 2016. Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Leslie Wayne since 1993. Solo exhibitions at the gallery include: Rags (2014), One Big Love (2010), Trouble in Paradise (2007), Re-Entering (2000), and Breaking and Entering (1998).