Bøker utgitt av bd-studios.com

Inspired by finding and reconnecting with his birth mother, queer Northern-Irish artist Jonathan David Smyth's latest monograph brings together a range of mixed media and text, including a series of nude self-portraits created predominantly during the 2020 lockdown."Before re-meeting my biological mother, I'd never encountered a direct physical resemblance between me and another person," explains Smyth. "After we met, I found it nearly impossible to not see her face when I looked at myself in the mirror. This led me to think about the idea of family in its many configurations; how other people can mentor us or deter us, and how shared circumstances and stories can affect and shape us as individuals."Now That You've Gone and Come Back features 20 nude self-portraits, 20 handwritten pieces, three original poems, and a personal essay by the artist.

Until age three, she believed her parents when they said she was like everyone else and should go along accordingly. So, she did, never mind the missing toes. She walked, talked, ran, and swam. She learned to read, write, sing, and ride a bike, all ahead of schedule. And then, as the doctors had forewarned, the left leg began to outpace the right, the knee, the shinbone... The girl was lucky, they said. Others were missing both feet. Some without an arm and a leg, both hands, both arms, or even all of their limbs. And that part, the luck, is most definitely true. Sandy Hiortdahl's Hang Five explores the ties between wholeness and identity, otherness and passing, not only in our bodies but in our spirits. Who are we compared to who we're told we are, our worst projections, our ideal selves, and our ambitions? Neither the questions nor the answers are easy, and in that way, we are alike. These poems suggest we manage to gather our luck, uncover our truth, and go along accordingly.

The Girl Who Wasn't and Is, Anastasia Walker's first book of poetry, is a deeply personal work and a meditation on community, history, and the natural world. In a series of poems and a closing autobiographical essay, the poet embraces her identity as a transgender woman through a harrowing, wonder-full journey from her childhood on the Maine coast to her post-transition life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Original photos and drawings, and the interspersed stories of family and friends, community members, historical and mythological figures, and the allied struggles of others create a broad sense of connection. The Girl Who Wasn't and Is is a rich mosaic that invites readers to a conversation about death and life, despair and hope, time and memory, and the perennial complexities of love.

Vigil is an eloquent and elegant story in poems, told from the afterlife by dead teenagers who were victims of a school shooting. Like Edgar Lee Masters''s Spoon River Anthology, Bevins''s poems give voice to the souls who can no longer speak for themselves. The afterlife for this bunch of teenagers, as it turns out, is full of gossip and idle chatter, not unlike the school halls they wandered in life. Even from the beyond, they have the same wishes, fears, hopes, and dreams as those they left behind. Vigil is a poetic condemnation of the gun violence that plagues the United States, but it is also a celebration of life.

Springtime in Byzantium collects three distinct but related works by luke kurtis: a poem titled theodora, a series of conceptual photographs titled marble paintings, and a performance art/video art piece titled labyrinth. Structured around and inspired by the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, this trilogy of works is presented alongside photographs and digital collage works also by the artist.The motif that pulls the book together is the bookmatched marble panels of San Vitale. "Its kaleidoscope-like forms are so captivating, yet they're overshadowed by the famous mosaics," says the artist. "If you stop and think about it, the bookmatched marble isn't out of place in a contemporary design sense. You could take the panels out of the church and put them in a modern building, and no one would bat an eye. I wanted to use my photographs to remove the panels conceptually, put them in your hands in the form of a book, and draw a line through hundreds of years to connect the past with the future."The works were created independently over several years and only conceived as a whole specifically for this book, altogether representing a decade of artistic practice, from 2011, when the first work was created, to 2021, when the project was realized in printed form. Though kurtis has published several poetry books, all of which feature his visual work, this is the first book where his visuals are the focus.

Composer-performer Michael Harren's multi-media performance The Animal Show blends humor with candor to convey the importance of keeping all animals safe from harm. Through stories, music, and video from his residency at Tamerlaine Farm Animal Sanctuary, The Animal Show takes the audience on a ride that will inspire us to think differently about our relationships with all kinds of animals. The Animal Book contains the entire text of the show along with performance photos, video stills, and stories of the show's tour and Harren's activism on the road.

Georgia Dusk is an autobiographical poetry and photography chapbook collaboration by Dudgrick Bevins and luke kurtis. Both born in Dalton, Georgia and raised in rural Appalachia, the poet's lives followed very different paths. Yet they both ended up in New York City where they eventually met for the first time. Upon discovering their common roots, the two poets developed a unique poetic bond. In Georgia Dusk, their contrasting literary and visual styles give way to poetic dialogue that explores themes of grief, longing, gratitude, pain, and joy against the simultaneous backdrops of their shared heritage and adopted home.

Train to Providence is a conversation between poet and photographer. Rodger Kingston's photographs were made over a sustained period of several decades, while William Doreski's poems were written in the short span of a few months. The pictures do not illustrate the poems, and the poems do not merely describe the photographs. But the words and images, brought together here for the first time, seem to have something to say to each other in ongoing, elongated moments caught and framed for close examination.

Jordan's Journey is a genealogical mashup incorporating photography, writing, design, research, and more. Gone are the boring register reports and dry descriptions found in genealogical tomes of old. Jordan's Journey takes a new approach, fusing together the creative and academic in a way that breathes new life into family history.The book is a lush, high-quality artist book that will be right at home on coffee tables everywhere. Equal parts genealogical memoir, art photography, and local history, Jordan's Journey pulls you in with a rich and immersive experience. With more than 75 original photos by the author, as well as over 150 vintage images, Jordan's Journey invites you on a trip into the rural south of yesteryear.

In his emotionally raw yet darkly hilarious Tentative Armor, Michael Harren combines piano, synthesizers, a laptop and live string players with his unique storytelling, resulting in a deeply moving, highly entertaining performance. In its book form, Tentative Armor captures Harren's resonant, powerful, very personal stories, and immerses the reader in a funny, poignant, highly intimate tour of his own self-discovery through spirituality, sexuality and grief. The entire text of the show is combined here with video stills from the show's premiere at NYC experimental performance landmark Dixon Place along with original photos by luke kurtis.

Sam Rosenthal first used the Internet as a confused and closeted gay teen who longed for an online escape from his offline reality. Rosenthal explores the alienation he experienced socially and the refuge he found on the Internet by appropriating images from real-time network cameras, known as "netcams." The cameras are accessed through unencrypted servers on the world wide web and are available to anyone with an Internet connection. Information such as geographic location and ownership of these netcams isn't provided, leaving the cameras without identity or clear intention. Yet, still, the artist sees them as an escape. "I believe I've visited these places even though I don't know where they are," he says.For Here Nor There, Rosenthal sought out camera feeds displaying uncanny scenes; the ones familiar and mundane, yet unidentifiable and dreamlike. The book features fantastical imagery of palm trees, pastel colors, and vibrant sunsets that conjure up feelings of an idealistic world. But Internet connections are imperfect and data loss often translates into visual flaws of pixelation and static, breaking those idealistic illusions. This assault of dropped packets disrupts the fantasy and grounds the images in reality. The Internet can never provide a permanent escape, leaving both the artist and his viewers lost somewhere in cyberspace, neither here nor there.

the immeasurable fold is an autobiographical poetry collection that explores the poet's trajectory from rural southern farm boy to life as a Greenwich Village artist. The poems recount memories of family, hurt, love, loss, joy, sadness, longing, and forgiveness all through the lens of a spiritual reckoning.Not a typical selected-works collection, nor exclusively new work, the immeasurable fold is based upon a manuscript of poems written in early 2000 titled lazy dreams and other memories. Though the full-length manuscript remains unpublished, in 2005 kurtis included a selection of those poems (along with a few newer ones) in his debut solo exhibition, for which he used the same title. bd-studios.com published a small, limited edition exhibition catalog of those poems and photographs. Long out-of-print, those poems, additional/unpublished poems from the original manuscript, as well as new poems written in the years since-altogether spanning a decade and a half, from 2000 through 2015-have been compiled in this new collection.

With more than 80 reproductions of his work, Retrospective is the first published overview of Michael Tice's career. The book spans over five decades from the 1970's to the present day. Tice's early works are rooted in a sort of domestic surrealism that evolves into a more complex exploration of male sexuality and gender roles. Many of his images can be seen as a critique of the "American dream." His enduring interests in the domestic space, childhood innocence, and cultural nostalgia combined with his masterful use of color and texture brings to light an American past that, perhaps, only existed within the surreal landscape of the viewer's mind to begin with.

In 1963, Allen Ginsberg traveled to Cambodia and visited the ancient Khmer temples. He wrote "Angkor Wat," an eponymous poem about the temple complex. It was a very different time: pre-Vietnam War, pre-Khmer Rouge, and before the bustling tourism trade that is now the lifeblood of Siem Reap. Yet the Angkor Wat temples themselves remain a unique source of inspiration for poets and photographers who travel there from all over the world.Over half a century later, Angkor Wat by luke kurtis is both the artist's homage to Ginsberg's text as well a celebration of his own pilgrimages to the ancient city. Published in 1968, Ginsberg's Angkor Wat book was a single long poem accompanied by photographs by Alexandra Lawrence. kurtis's book is a suite of poems paired with his original photography. Chronicling the poet's own travels where he explored mythical stories and experienced mystical visions, kurtis's poems take you on a tour of Angkor Wat (and beyond) unlike any other and tell the story of one American poet deepening his Buddhist spirituality.

INTERSECTION is a collection of poetry, photography, and found texts by luke kurtis created as part of the artist's rediscovery of his southern heritage. It's his self-described "ode to the south." Paired with the companion INTERSECTION zine, also published by bd-studios.com, the artist's rural upbringing is contrasted with his adult life as a New York artist.

The Language of History: A Greenwich Village Artist Remembers 9/11 is an intimate collection of work by interdisciplinary artist luke kurtis. The artist, a long time resident of Greenwich Village, witnessed the 9/11 attacks from the street near his home at 9th Street and 6th Avenue. This book collects a selection of his photography and writing created in response to the tragedy.