Mellis Daniel (4 results)

12 x 9 1/4 in. paper over boards with cloth spine, in Bradel binding with letterpress-printed elements. Contains 64 pp., with four-page gatefold and seven transparent leaves, printed on a HP Indigo; transparent pages are laser-printed. From the artist's statement: "A History of Light explores the relationship between memory, photography, historical documents, and the inaccessibility of the past through a poetic examination of the negative space of the Dan Ryan Expressway in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago." "A science-fiction narrative tells the story of a group of people who have become blind to a section of highway: they miss exits they could have sworn existed but can not name and suddenly find themselves across the river from their destinations. In their attempts to understand their logistical difficulties, they look to the archives, and discover in historical aerial photography a second sight. They see, instead of the highway, stories about the neighborhood's past; stories that are excerpted from the artist's interview with a homeless man from the area, living beneath the highway. Louis Rubio becomes a character in the book, and guides them to beneath the overpass, where their second sight reveals, in the highway's substructure, detailed demographic information from the U.S. Census. They are overwhelmed by the enormity of the unrecoverable past; their blindness and vision fade; and they are left in the present." This is from an edition of 125 copies, hand-numbered and signed by the artist. As new.

10 x 8 in. cloth over boards clamshell box, housing 18 "auto-pressure" letterpress prints, along with 24 pp. booklet produced with laser printing and three-color offset lithography. From the artist's statement: "Ars Combinatoria is an exploration of the graphic possibilities of a single piece of wood typea thirty pica Clarendon Rand a restricted set of operationspositive and negative auto-pressure printing with only one inked impression. This technique enables the top of the wood type to interact with the bottom and itself. With aesthetic and technical constraints there are eighteen prints," for which Mellis has created a special system of notation to document the permutations and combinations of this procedure. Mellis describes the process of "pressure printing" at greater length: "The variable pressure between the paper and the printing surface does not have to be created by a low-relief paper collage. It can also be generated by a relief surface on the paper itself. In Ars Combinatoria, blind impressions of the top and bottom of the wood type R are the relief surfaces for pressure printing. The forms of the top and bottom of the block can thus interact with each other and themselves. This method of pressure printing converts the surface of the wood type from relief to planographic. I call the technique of using one block both for the printing surface and to create the low-relief paper collage, auto-pressure printing." A PDF of the explanatory booklet that accompanies the project is available here. Printed on a Vandercook Universal I at Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book & Paper Arts, on Crane's Lettra. The booklet was printed on the Center's Heidelberg GTO, with title and cover page printed letterpress and laser-printed endpapers. This is from an edition of 30 copies. As new.

From the publisher's website: Tango with Cows by Vasily Kamensky is a key artifact in the history of Russian Futurism, graphic design, visual poetry, and artists' books. Printed in Moscow in March 1914 on pentagonal sheets of floral wallpaper, all of the book's poems have a prominent visual form created entirely with typography. The most experimental works in the bookthe six so-called "ferroconcrete poems"dispense with linear order and explore the spatial possibilities of the printed page. The book also includes two illustrations by David Burliuk and one by his brother Vladimir. Most of the book is about the modern city and modern technology. There are poems about aviation (Kamensky, the first ever poet-aviator, performed exhibition flights before crashing his plane in 1912), the movies, the telephone, the circus, Moscow night clubs, roller skating, and Sergei Shchukin's collection of modern painting. The poems also make repeated references to the global tango craze of 191314. With the publication of Tango with Cows: Translation, Facsimile, and Commentary it has now been translated into English and recreated for the twenty-first century by Daniel Mellis and Eugene Ostashevsky. This is the trade edition, which includes the screen and letterpress printed translation and offset printed facsimile, housed in paper envelopes mounted to a cloth-covered portfolio; a 308-page commentary book, printed offset with a letterpress printed cover, containing seven overlays and one double-gatefold; the supplemental portfolio in a paper envelope with offset printed facsimiles of the first edition of Un coup de dés, La Prose du Transsibérien, a poster for the Russian Futurist performance in Kazan, a Russian circus poser, and a recreation of the wallpaper the book was printed on. All of the above is housed in a cloth covered slipcase. There are 375 numbered copies of the trade edition. Photographs courtesy of the publisher.

no binding. Condition: good. First Edition. Original Printed patent disbound About 27cm by 18cm some wear and tear due to the disbinding.