Two weeks ago, during one of the frequent brainstorming sessions that our collective engages in over G+, we decided what we were missing was a physical archive of works. Between our website and blogs and their various links we could go back and see the various exhibits and pieces we've created as Seeking Kali. But, with a couple of face to face meetings coming up with people who could give us a leg up we realized we needed something more than a laptop to present our work.
Susan Shulman, Ria Vanden Eynde and myself have been in high gear with over a dozen projects squeezed into the past two years and we wanted something physical to show the scope and variety of what we've accomplished with our experiment in social media networking.
early mock up of catalog
This may have been one of those projects that could have been accomplished on one of the self publishing sites but we're particular about every aspect of book making and it's also a good opportunity to show off some skills as well as the art. So the idea for a small catalog that touched upon all the past two years work was born. Initially we needed to layout how big this project was and what we wanted to include, so a few trials with printer paper mock ups led us to settle on a 36 page book that contains 3 hand stitched sections.
cover with the three sections prior to binding
Most of our layout was done in Photoshop and via G+ we screenshared order, layouts, captions, possible photos for inclusion and proofing the final bifolds. Once settled online the pages were printed in my Connecticut studio on a nine color Epson 3800 using Red River semigloss Zeppelin 45 lb paper.
After folding and collating we made final corrections for spacing and content before printing the first run of 10 copies.
a stiff open weave cloth is glued to the spine before the cover is attached
screen shot showing a finished book over G+ video conference
From idea to book in two weeks. We now have examples of our portfolio from the last two years and while the work ranges from performance to video to print editions we also have artist books and the catalog is an nice example to lay into the hands of a few curious curators. Wish us luck.
More about our artist books can be found on the Seeking Kali website.
