Couleurs du Spectre

Camille Vivier, Couleurs du Spectre

Camille Vivier, Couleurs du Spectre
Softcover, 68 pp., offset 4/4, 8.5 x 11 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9825936-4-6
Published by Seems

$24.00 ·

Couleurs du Spectre, contains a selection of photographs by Camille Vivier taken over the last ten years. They blend together classical pictorial subjects such as still life, nudes, and animals but with a distinct personal eye revealing a shadowy universe. Each photograph is theatrically staged employing props and the artifice of light to play with the formal beauty of the subject, while revealing a certain strangeness among the stillness. Vivier uses literature, cinema, and art history to reinterpret common cultural references and create a personal collection of curios and imagery of fantastic animals and characters. The film sequences are an extension of the photographic process and allow for further exploration of themes and imagery.

Untitled 2004-2010

Ara Peterson, Untitled 2004-2010

Ara Peterson, Untitled 2004-2010
Softcover, 68 pp., offset 4/4, 6.75 x 9.25 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-9825936-5-3
Published by Seems

$25.00 ·

Ara Peterson’s arresting three-dimensional objects fall somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture. The somewhat outmoded practice of a ‘bas-relief’ comes to mind, but this type of ornamentation doesn’t fully capture the voluptuousness of these structures, which are as much about optical clairvoyance as they are about process. Indeed, each piece results from a series of labor-intensive operations, beginning with the synthesis of wave formations that translate the artist’s initial mental image into a basic form. This is an impressionistic use of algorithms to determine the cutting of wooden slats, which are then hand-painted and assembled into unique volumes that are perhaps most simply described as passageways into new visual intensities.

— Franklin Melendez

Pink/Brown Stool/Stool

Misha Hollenbach, Pink/Brown Stool/Stool

Misha Hollenbach, Pink/Brown Stool/Stool
Softcover, 64 pp., offset 4/4, 4.5 x 7 inches
Edition of 250
ISBN 978-0-9825936-3-9
Published by Seems

out of print

Born last century. Based in Melbourne, Australia. Misha Hollenbach lives and works in many languages, times and places. Hollenbach is one half of the brand Perks and Mini (P.A.M.) a multi media excursion encompassing art, design, fashion, and publishing. He is also part of The Changes, music and art collective.

Hollenbach is influenced by energy, as his work moves through various mediums including sculpture and painting, printed media and collage. Rather than shy away from objects deemed useless, or unwanted, he embraces their meaningless meanings to create an unfamiliar language containing familiar objects. By employing found objects and pairing them with wit and humor, he continues the narrative of the Dada and Pop artists.

In a lineage that extends through Jim Shaw, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, the rallying around the already readymade repositions things for freer symbolic enterprises. In the re-presentation of shit, Misha touches upon the etymological origins of faeces, which derives from faex, the Latin for dregs. He is using the dregs, things humans have casted away; shit becomes a metaphor for the unwanted.

By putting these outcasts back together with ready mix, the images of the objects do not return to us as they normally should; they lose their original function. With this method, he is breaking our own need to put the image back together in a fixed or familiar way. He strips back the structure of meaning — and this brings about a danger: the readymades return as phantasms and representations of abstract ideas. A Hush Puppy becomes a Push Poopy. Doodoo becomes Dada.

—Timothy Moore

Smoke Bath

Peter Sutherland, Smoke Bath

Peter Sutherland, Smoke Bath
Softcover, 328 pp., offset 1/1, 5.25 x 8 inches
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-98259360202
Published by Seems

out of print

Smoke Bath is a collection of photographs and art work loosely based on the theme of camping, nature, and exploring.

The goal of Smoke Bath is to showcase the work of artists that are inspired by nature and raise money for freshair.org in the process. The Fresh Air Fund (freshair.org) is an independent, not-for-profit agency that provides free summer vacations to New York City children from low-income communities.

Cold Pop

Mark DeLong, Cold Pop

Mark DeLong, Cold Pop
Softcover, 100 pp., offset 4/1, 7.75 x 9.75 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9825936-0-8
Published by Seems

$24.00 ·

Cold Pop features three separate but related bodies of work by artist Mark DeLong: a series of six panel cartoons, a selection of ceramics, and graphite drawings. Delong combines dreamlike associations with movie and television references that, though tongue-in-cheek and humorous, border on the horrific. The vast network of associations — anthropomorphized raisins, rabbits, and and cats — mingle in an absured and anxiety-laden world where figures wrestle with their neuroses, boredom, unrequited lust, and romantic rejection.

The Seconds Pass

Ed Templeton, The Seconds Pass

Ed Templeton, The Seconds Pass
Hardcover, 154 pp., offset 4/4, 11 x 7.75 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9825936-1-5
Published by Seems

$52.00 ·

There is a scribble of asphalt and meandering ribbons of concrete tangled all over North America in a contiguous line of material that connects each of us to whomever else is also in contact. I sometimes marvel at this, walking from my front door and standing on the asphalt looking down at its grimy blackness, wishing I could rest my ear down on it and hear everything like the Indians in an old western film. The pavement I’m standing on is connected to other pavement, concrete, or steel to almost anywhere I can think of. Certainly everywhere you can drive to. Someone in Burnt Church, Tennessee is standing on gravel that is connected by touch to my street, just like someone is in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I can be in New York City in 3 days from my home in the suburban sprawl of Orange County, California without ever touching the earth.

—Ed Templeton

News and Updates

Eddie Martinez, News and Updates

Eddie Martinez, News and Updates
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/4, 8.5 x 11 inches
Edition of 750
ISBN 978-1-60743-475-7
Published by Seems

$22.00 ·

Martinez was born in 1977, and has had solo exhibitions at ZieherSmith in New York, Galleri Loyal in Stockholm, and Seomi & Tuus in Seoul. He has participated in group exhibitions at Deitch Projects in New York, Galerie Mikael Andersen in Berlin, and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles.

Giving in to Live the Experience

Paul Wackers, Giving in to Live the Experience

Paul Wackers, Giving in to Live the Experience
Softcover, 24 pp., offset 4/1, 9.5 x 12.5 inches
Edition of 500
Published by Seems

$16.00 ·

Wackers’ depicts the remnants of human activity, but people are noticeably absent from his compositions. He focuses instead on what is left behind, or perhaps abandoned: facsimiles of the natural world, vacant interiors, and clusters of accumulated objects.

Muddy Treads

Peter Sutherland, Muddy Treads

Peter Sutherland, Muddy Treads
Softcover, 36 pp., offset 4/1, 6 x 9.5 inches
Edition of 1000
Published by Seems

$16.00 · out of stock

There was a large chunk of land behind my junior high school known as “The Hills.” It was an unclaimed no man’s land, where you could do whatever you wanted. There were strange half built sheds, bags of lawn clippings, some illegally dumped furniture, and the occasional dead animal. Locals would go there to drink beer, burn stuff for fun, and drive four wheelers on the hills, some of which were steep and untracked.

Thought Forms

Mike Paré, Thought Forms

Mike Paré, Thought Forms
Softcover, 24 pp., offset 4/1, 9.5 x 12.5 inches
Edition of 500
Published by Seems

$16.00 ·

Mike Paré’s current works are explorations of youthful transcendence and bliss through music, meditation, gurus, be–ins and skateboarding.

Fragments

Joseph Hart, Fragments

Joseph Hart, Fragments
Softcover, 24 pp., offset 4/1, 9.5 x 12.5 inches
Edition of 500
Published by Seems

$16.00 ·

A few thousand years of history brings its own sorts of distances, and ways those distances are elided. There’s all this stuff still hanging around. Go to a museum and you can see it all at once, this accumulation of artifacts, flattened by artificial proximity. But the cultural world has constellations too: narratives and value systems to connect the dots, a whole technology of display to demonstrate importance. How else can people be expected to navigate?

Joseph Hart is an intrepid navigator of distances–aesthetic and astronomical. Sometimes obsessive, sometimes casual and a bit loopy, his paintings pay as much attention to the maps as to the territory. They look at what gets put on pedestals and how things are framed. Hart lives in New York, where there are lots of museums, but he grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, where there are dark nights, with lots of stars. His childhood bedroom was filled with trophies. That’s important too, probably.

—Steven Stern

Foibles

Keegan McHargue, Foibles

Keegan McHargue, Foibles
Softcover, 20 pp. + two posters, offset 4/1, 10 x 14 inches
Edition of 500
Published by Seems

$22.00 ·

Keegan McHargue was born in Portland, Oregon in 1982, and currently lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, Rivington Arms, Metro Pictures, and The Wrong Gallery in New York City, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, and Hiromi Yoshii Gallery in Tokyo. His work is part of several public collections, including the Deste Foundation in Athens, and the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as the New York Museum of Modern Art.

McHargue combines banal interiors, pattern, and disjointed figures to create dystopic paintings and drawings that reference both art history and the psyche. His flattened compositions, simplified shapes, and neat planes of color echo the artificial, mannered nature of his scenes. These elements belie a darker narrative than may first appear.

Hug the Gray

Mat O’brien, Hug the Gray

Mat O’brien, Hug the Gray
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/4, 6.5 x 9 inches
Edition of 1000
Published by Seems

$16.00 ·

Introduction by Brian DeGraw.