About the exhibit

Artists:

Alice Shaw
Alisa Golden
Betsy Davids
Bettina Pauly
Casey Gardner
Charles Hobson
Julie Chen
Karen Sjoholm
Kat Howard
Lucia Dill
Lucy Childs
Macy Chadwick
Mandie Rider
Michael Henninger
Nance O'Banion
Reiko Fujii
Thomas Rockwell

 

Julie Chen

Berkeley, California

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Family Tree

wooden blocks, digital prints on mulberry paper, ink, book cloth, and book board

8 x 8 x 2 box is 9 x 9¼ x 2¾© 2013

edtion size: 50

$ 975

I struggled with this draw at first mainly because of the “no text” prompt that I originally got. In the end, I decide to exercise my option to throw one card back, and drew a new card from the text category. My original plan was to create a deck of cards, but as my ideas for the project progressed, I became more and more interested in the idea of random access of content that was afforded by creating something that was unbound. This eventually led me to the idea of creating a set of blocks so that each individual block in the set would have six possible sides of content that could be mixed and matched with the six possible sides of all the other blocks. The theme for the piece was based on work that I was already involved with on the theme of family history and personal identity. As is often the case with my process, my structure ideas turned out to inform my content ideas in unexpected, but meaningful ways.

Ideation Cards:

technique: use a technique that is unfamiliar to you

layout: centered on the page

paper: neutral

text: none (thrown back)

text second draw: self-generated

image: extracted from a single image

color: favorite

structure: unbound (set of cards, series of prints)

adjectives: quiet or subtle, mystical or spiritual, futuristic, non-sequential, and formal

Julie Chen is an internationally known book artist who has been publishing limited edition artists’ books under the Flying Fish Press imprint for over 25 years. Her artists’ books can be found in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She lives in Berkeley, California and is an associate professor of book art at Mills College.

to purchase any of the work in the exhibition, contact Alicia

click here to purchase print catalog