Jennifer West: Media Archaeology

I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.
— David Pagel, Los Angeles Times

What I want is for the portrait to be like a thumbprint on a water glass—a broad reminder that someone has been there.
— John Sonsini

When art critic David Pagel realized he had written five reviews about John Sonsini over the past thirty years, this book project was born. Even though he had been covering the work of the Los Angeles-based painter for three decades, they had never met until they began collaborating on this project. The unique, intimate compilation brings together an extensive essay by Pagel—including facsimile reproductions of the original five articles—along with illustrations, plates, and archival pieces that cover Sonsini’s artistic trajectory, from early works to his most recent watercolors and large-scale commissions. Broad Reminders provides a rambling, joyful, engaging look into the world of art and artists, critics, and creators.

[His work] is full of large, ambitious, brilliantly executed mosaics full of so many disparate cultural references, snarling faces and masks and intimations of violence that it can initially be hard to focus.[…] To say that he might have discovered his artistic destiny is putting it mildly.

— Roberta Smith, The New York Times

The inaugural monograph of multidisciplinary artist Cameron Welch presents a vivid, comprehensive look into a young artist’s practice. Welch’s work has straddled sculpture, collage, and textiles, but in early 2017, he shifted to mosaic as his primary medium. As a child, the artist was introduced to mosaic by his grandmother, an experience that has a lasting impact on the way he works the age-old medium to piece together disparate materials and histories. Welch treats mosaic as a physical manifestation of intertextuality, referring to the colliding contexts he unearths in the work as a kind of “infiltration.”

While Welch’s chosen medium evokes ancient traditions, the effect of his work is decidedly contemporary. His chaotic, jumbled compositions speak to the same anxiety felt in the Information Age, an era when unlimited information is available at the tap of a screen. Amidst the pictorial chaos of Welch’s mosaics, the figures who emerge range from familiar to foreign, comical to heroic. Frequently depicting himself and figures from his own life, Welch sheds light on unsung histories within the intricate topology of his creations. An incisive essay by Greek and Roman Art scholar Alexis Belis helps readers contextualize Welch’s work within historical and contemporary creative practice.

Printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs, this work of book art documents artist Ann Hamilton’s fascination with tactility, an exploration into the possibility of cultivating attention in a hyper-distracted world of information.

Throughout her practice, Ann Hamilton has used videos and still images as part of her larger installation works, though they have rarely been the singular focus of a project. This publication brings together vocabulary from four bodies of image-based work produced over the last five years and includes photographic portraits as well as lens-less contact scans of ornithological taxidermy, fabrics and garments, and objects from various personal and institutional collections. Hamilton believes that her projects can be considered not as artifacts or something to be documented, but as their own material object—in this case, a book. While Sense contains images that Hamilton has accumulated over many years, of people and of objects that conflate touch, light, and surface, the book also becomes an object in hand, a thing felt, an artwork in itself. 

Reprocessed through multiple printings on tissue Gampi and newsprint, the images emphasize the tactile nature of their substrate and Hamilton’s material hand. The work’s physical presence is reinforced by the textured surface of the book’s pages and scale shifts. This volume thus becomes an art object of its own; repetition, the atmospheric nature of the images’ shallow depths of field, and the intuitive connections made between different bodies of work create an almost film-like cadence that renders the felt qualities of touch.

”The passage of time surpasses the present, projecting towards the future and the fragility and mortality of things.”  

— Enrique Martínez Celaya

Artwork by Enrique Martínez Celaya
Interview with Irene Hofmann

Hardcover
9 x 12 inches
320 pages / 160 images
ISBN: 9781934435717