Reader's Art 12: Maryann Riker

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home  Maryann Riker

Maryann Riker is a mixed-media artist whose artist books and collage works convey a visual narrative to remind one of the past and journeys through which we all travel throughout our lives.  Her works incorporate digital images, Victorian iconography, and other symbols to convey a sense of memory and time as one opens and unfolds the work.   

Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally and are in the Special Collections of:  The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Yale University, Mills College, University of Iowa, Rhode Island School of Design, Lafayette College, Rutgers University, Newark Art Museum, Newark Public Library and many other private and public collections.

When not creating, Maryann is writing grants, reading mystery or historical fiction novels, practicing to be a wild wannabe or working on becoming a legend in her own living room.




Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Michelle Ray

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home  Michelle Ray-

Admeasure

2011
text and image printed from photopolymer plates and linoleum blocks on handmade and Somerset Book papers, edition of 35
8 1/8" x 3" x 1/4"

The act of naming things creates a sense of relative safety at sea. Like the pilot’s verse that guided sailors through dangerous shoals, Admeasure is about gaining a false sense of control through signifiers and ritual that guide one through a world that is largely uncontrollable. This book explores the dialectic tension between the dangerous unknown and measure, rules and tradition. While at sea, measurements, maritime law, navigation aids and other modes of dominance through organization are easily lost to the forces of nature and the psychology of a journey. The content of Admeasure draws from a variety of archetypal journeys including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Homer’s Odyssey, Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous and my own time spent in small boats.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12 : Amandine Nabarra Piomelli

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home   Amandine Nabarra Piomelli

The Caretaker

A series of 14 photographs based on a true story (see below) and presented as a centered accordion book in a fabric like box. The title of the box is hidden by the band to keep the secret of the story safe.

Some secrets become obsessions and can change the course of one’s life. This metamorphosis is at the heart of a project made of several artistic short stories. One of them, The Caretaker, is based on the life of Mrs T. On her wedding day, her aunt, who she thought was her mother broke the secret about her  parents’ identity. This shocking revelation slowly changed Mrs. T.’s destiny and sent her off to roam about the world in search of her father.

Mrs T.’s Vietnamese mother had met a Chinese man in Hong-Kong, but their love story was short lived. Returning home to care for her dying mother, she realized she was pregnant. Two years after Mrs T.’s birth, her mother died and the little girl was raised by her aunt who hid the identity of her parents until her wedding day. Before the ceremony the bride received a box containing an old photo of a young man and a golden ring  that her mother had left for her. After spending the next 20 years raising her children, Mrs T. decides to leave her family to find her father. In order to finance her quest, she will work as a caretaker.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

March 16- April 26

Reader's Art 12: Kelly Parsell

Reader's Art : Longing for Home  Kelly Parsell- Circulate

This accordion-fold artist book explores the nostalgia and longing for our pasts. The piece highlights six different homes and their specific qualities for which the speaker/narrator still yearns. Circulate investigates the notion of “absence” and how objects, emotions, and histories can continue living on through memory.

Reader's Art : Longing for Home

March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Carol Morris

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home   Carol Morris-The place is the exotic landscape of childhood in rural Ohio. Where tigers and lions could co-exist with squirrels. While doing the book I was enchanted by feelings of beauty and safety. Altered  books are my favorite medium. I love books and love discarded books. By altering them,  I preserve  them.

Bio:     I try to remember it's not about me so I will talk in the third person. Carol is a poet, video film maker, and visual artist.  Painting, assemblage and altering things are her favorite mediums. In the last year she's been included in exhibits in Michigan, California and Colorado.

She continues her decade long work of bringing art to women in prison. She lives in Ann Arbor Michigan and loves her grandsons abundantly, as  her grandmother did her.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

Reader's Art 12: Barbara Milman

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home


Barbara Milman- I work primarily in two media: prints and handmade artist books (either in very small editions or unique). The books all have a message or story that is told both by the books as art objects and by their text and images. 

The message, for the past several years, has been about climate change.  My specific concerns have been with the fate of coral reefs, the warming of the oceans and the Arctic, the effect of climate change on different environments and species.

My books are experimental in form.  Most recently I have been making books out of old cigar boxes, which I alter and into which I put smaller books, or texts and images.  The books are multi-media, incorporating monoprints, linocuts, solar plate etchings, hand stamped type, decorative paper, digital photography, and digital design.  At times I use some traditional bookmaking methods, such as accordion books or Coptic bindings, but for the most part techniques are developed for each book to fit the design and the message.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Maggie Miller

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home   

Maggie Miller:

"The project is a visual interpretation of the book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.   Calvino’s book is a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan as Marco Polo reports on the vast Tartar Empire through the lens of personal insights that arise from interactions each place.  A fourteen odd page mixed media piece, working with pop-up architecture and found prints, my work creates vignettes of Khan’s cities, participating in the conversation as a reader reflecting on Polo’s discoveries about the relationship between self and setting.  The viewer is given a chance to engage with a city fully assembled, stretching out as an accordion of compiled images and quotations.  Closed, pop-ups retreat back into blank pages, just as Calvino’s cities themselves are in essence bare canvases.  Prints draw on the discussions of the limitations of language in establishing a common vernacular of experience. "

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

March 12- April 26, 2012