For all the labor and love that goes into making art, the resulting period of display often seems no more than a blink. Enter the catalog: a glossy memento that lets an exhibit live on long after the nails have been removed from the walls and the champagne glasses have been washed.
In the past month, I've heard from a trio of Bay area residents who have self-published art catalogs documenting their projects. Two were enabled by Lulu.com, an online and on-demand publishing house that liberates self-publishers from the expense of pre-ordering many books; the third book takes a slightly more traditional approach.
St. Petersburg artist Leslie Fry always knew her work at Boca Ciega Millennium Park in Seminole wouldn't last forever. For one thing, the figurative sculptures — fantastical woodland creatures seen nesting in and propping up actual trees and springing out of the ground — are made of biodegradable plaster. For another, their wide-open setting naturally exposes them to the elements and the possibility of vandalism.
"That's OK — part of this [project] is about the environment and things regenerating, decomposing and returning to the earth," Fry says.
After winning a commission to create and install seven of her "sculptural interventions" at the park in 2007, Fry hatched the idea of commemorating the project with a catalog published through Lulu. (Andy Goldsworthy, the British sculptor whose site-specific land art often survives only through photography, was her inspiration.) A former book designer, she worked with a local graphic designer to create a 44-page, paperback catalog with color photographs by Burk Uzzle and essays about the project by Nick Capasso, curator of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts and the Seminole park's supervisor. Titled Wild Life, it's now available online for $14.88.
Beyond mere documentation, the catalog presents a before-and-after experience of Fry's ever-changing sculptures that a visit to the park alone won't convey — though, to be sure, there's no replacement for seeing them in person. One series of photos shows the artist carving and painting the white plaster pieces in her St. Petersburg studio; another demonstrates the aftermath of weather, plant growth around the sculptures and vandalism at the park. (Still more poignant, a pair of sympathetic letters to the artist lamenting the vandalism are also included.) Fry's is the rare case when a catalog transcends the role of souvenir to become a powerful component of the project in its own right.
Chris Parks, owner of Pale Horse Design and Gallery in St. Petersburg, also used Lulu to publish a slick catalog for his gallery's recent exhibition of digital illustrations, prints, paintings and other works with an apocalyptic theme. At 74 full-color pages, The 2nd Coming costs $24.99 online; Parks says the gallery nets a profit of about $8 per book. Considering the time he spent designing the book and having a professional photographer shoot pieces by more than 30 artists, the catalog will likely never recoup its costs — but as a relatively inexpensive way to produce a quality marketing tool, Lulu fills a void, Parks says. As a graphic designer, he can point to a few details in the book that leave something to be desired — most noticeably, a grainy charcoal gray that appears where his design used black — but overall, he's satisfied. In fact, Parks hopes to publish similar catalogs with each of the gallery's quarterly shows in the future.
Though it was the product of months of work for Parks, collaborator Brandon Dunlap and others, The 2nd Coming (the exhibit) opened to the public for only two weeks in March. The catalog preserves their labors, showcasing the 30-plus artists — an impressively diverse range of local, regional, national and international talent — with a two-page spread of images and a brief bio for each. Juxtaposed in the catalog, the variety of aesthetic approaches taken by the artists — who all share some affinity with the emerging genres of art labeled "low brow" or Pop Surrealism — is all the more striking. From USF grad Chris Musina's wry animal watercolors (reminiscent of the well-known drawings of Marcel Dzama) to Sarasota resident Erik Holmen's stunningly photorealistic robot illustration, the apocalyptic visions in this volume look good.
A third local book documents the extensive photography collection of Clearwater oncologist Dr. Robert Drapkin, but Parallel Processes — Striking Images: 19th and 20th Century Photographs from the Drapkin Collection is a decidedly more sophisticated production than the Lulu catalogs. The 280-page, hardcover tome — printed in Hyderabad, India, by Pragati Printers — includes more than 200 color reproductions with scholarly essays by Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Director John Schloder and Chief Curator Jennifer Hardin, as well as USF Graphicstudio curator Noel Smith and former director of research Deli Sacilotto, among others. Though Drapkin generously lends photographs from his 5,000-object collection to local exhibits each year, the book offers a delightful opportunity to revisit images again and again and to read Drapkin's own ruminations on the joy of collecting in an introduction.
Readers may be surprised by the collection's range and Drapkin's eye for the visually poetic. Chapters devoted to mid-19th-century Daguerreotype portraits and carte de visites (literally, a visiting card, traded among friends) put a human face — often poignant, occasionally bizarre — on early photography; hand-colored albumen prints from Meiji Japan (1868-1912) give vibrant life to kimonoed women and stoic warriors (including one committing seppuku, a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment); black-and-white journalistic photographs from the 1950s immortalize players in the hearings held by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Parallel Processes — Striking Images is substantial enough to satisfy the photography buff and accessible enough to convert new fans; handsomely designed, it can also stand with confidence next to volumes published by Phaidon or Rizzoli. Copies are available at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (fmopa.org) for $73 plus tax, $18 of which benefits the museum.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2008.