Bervin Jen: Signed (2 results)

7 x 10 x 2 1/4 in., 109 pp., unbound books and prints in clamshell box. At first glance Jen Bervin's fourth project with Granary Books appears to be a collection of typewritten pattern poems. Though both conceptual artists and concrete poets have used the typewriter in this way, Draft Notation was inspired by the work of twentieth-century modernist, textile designer, weaver, writer, and printmaker, Anni Albers. Albers used the typewriter as a way to create new patterns for woven design; the studies were published in her book On Weaving, where she writes: "These varied experiments in articulation are to be understood not as an end in themselves but merely as a help to us in gaining new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language." The title, Draft Notation, refers to the pre-weaving design diagrams a weaver creates or consultsa kind of written score for a woven textile. The art of weaving dates back to 7000 BC and is one of the earliest grid forms. Bervin learned how to weave in order to find "new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language" on a typewriter. She made the typed studies in this edition following intensive time spent weaving advanced cloth structures on the loom and researching in the archives of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the Ratti Textile Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each copy comprises: 1) four pale green books with a total of 57 typed studies reproduced in letterpress; 2) a numbered, unique typing on red board; 3) facsimiles of nine studies made on different typewriters; 4) a typed process note; and 5) a colophon all contained in a sailcloth-covered clamshell box. This is from an edition of 75 copies, signed and numbered by the artist. As new.…

5 1/4 x 6 1/2 x 12 1/2 in., boxed edition. 7S, or, Seven Silks, began as a six-year research project (2010-2016) developed with expertise from more than thirty international textile archives, medical libraries, nanotechnology and biomedical labs, and sericulture sites in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Bervin collaborated with scientists David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto at the Tufts University Bioengineering Department who pioneered reverse-engineered liquefied silk and new uses for it-among these: an implantable biosensor on nanoimprinted clear silk film to monitor blood chemistry. Elaborating on this component of their research, Bervin wrote a poem to be inscribed on the silk biosensor. The project stems from her belief that poems have work to do: that reading such a biosensor inside the body is not a neutral context, but rather one pre-inscribed with concern about health and mortality, written in a material with a significant international history. The poem acts as a kind of talisman, written from the perspective of the silkworm, addressed to the person with the silk biosensor implanted in their body. The form of the poem strand is modeled on silk at the DNA level-the six-character repeat in the silk genome is the basis for the poem's six-letter line. The shape of the strand reflects both the filament deposition pattern that silkworms create when making their cocoon, as well as the beta sheet structures of silk proteins, both of which form like the weft thread in weaving. At Tufts University Silklab, the poem was fabricated in nanoscale using a mask to etch the poem in gold spatter on a wafer. Reverse-engineered liquid silk was then poured over the wafer. When the silk dried, the letters remained suspended in the clear film. Bervin's research and fabrication process for Silk Poems can be viewed in the short film by Charlotte Lagarde, and the full poem is available to read in book form published by Nightboat Books. Silk Poems was named a Book of the Year by The New Museum. 7S is an artist book edition that comprises the physical materials that informed Bervin's research, as well as newly-conceived iterations of the project. It includes an archival box containing two prints on silk fabric-the poem strand printed on silk, folded; a photograph of a silk cocoon printed on silk, a signed copy of Silk Poems (Nightboat Books, 2017) by Jen Bervin; a Bombyx Mori cocoon in glass jar, a vial with a scroll printed on silk, a vial with a skein of silk thread, a glass vial of liquid silk fibroin, and a colophon. This is from an edition of 100 copies. As new. This project is supported by Tufts Silklab, a Creative Capital Grant, a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, a Montalvo Art Center LAP Fellowship, and the Rauschenberg Residency.…