The artists’ book is a perfect form to experience the pleasures and politics of the handmade. Saturated ink spreading across a page. Layer upon layer. Looking that quickly opens up a range of senses. The Embodied Press features artist’s books and publications by queer and transgender artists, from graphic novels and collage-works to bold experiments with letterpress, screenprinting, video, performance, and risograph. Works from the 1970s to today overlap several successive chapters of LGBTQ+ and queer-feminist political action to expand our readings of contemporary queer culture. Artists in The Embodied Press make important visual and material choices in their use of printing techniques, sequencing, and manipulation or absence of text; they revel in visual abstraction as an antidote to the daily pressure of navigating our identities. What happens when a book “frustrates legibility” or becomes difficult to read? It must be felt. Held. Absorbed and activated. Each work poses questions about difference, intersectionality and power to show that sexual, gender and racial difference cannot be easily understood or legitimized through public visibility alone. These ideas find great resonance in the artists’ book field as it radically expands the ways books can be produced, read, and understood as a form of culture.

The Korean presentation of The Embodied Press for WRM Space, Seoul, presents a selection of works from the exhibition plus a capsule of works from Queer.Archive.Work by Providence based artist Paul Soulellis. Presented in conjunction with the Korean Typography Society 25th Annual gathering and conference. 

Artists
Megan Adie, Malic Amalya, Nadine Bariteau, Joshua Beckman, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Edie Fake, Tatana Kellner, Kate Laster, Emily McVarish, Heidi Neilson, Lyman Piersma, Pati Scobey, Miller & Shellabarger, Stan Shellabarger, Nicholas Shick and Clarissa Sligh

Exhibition tour
Mary E. Black Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
WRM Space, Seoul, Korea
KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, California, United States

Audio Guide
Produced and narrated by Steph Kudisch


Listen to the Embodied Press Audio Guide

Forthcoming book
The Embodied Press: Queer Liberation and the Artist’s Book

Acknowlegements
This exhibition is funded in part by the IFPDA Foundation and by Mary E. Black Gallery, Halifax Canada through a Halifax Regional Arts grant.

Research for The Embodied Press was supported by the inaugural Women’s Studio Workshop’s Research Residency Award (2022-23).

The Yozo Hamaguchi Scholarship Award and Visiting Artist Program fosters excellence in the study and practice of Printmedia at California College of the Arts. 

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hamaguchi program, and the opening of our brand new Double Ground print studios, CCA Printmedia is pleased to present a special program featuring a series of exceptional visiting artists. Artist and culture bearer of Korean hanji Aimee Lee presents a lecture and a studio intensive on building traditional tools for the creation of handmade paper. Distinguished CCA Alumni and master printer Courtney Sennish (MFA, 2015) presents a talk on Moonlight Press, her work as a collaborative printer, and a masterclass in advanced techniques for intaglio. Our Printmedia Studio Opening Party welcomes 30 years of CCA Print alumni back to CCA and the Bay Area print, paper and book Community to celebrate the reopening of our brand new double ground spaces. The event will feature the release of Zoe Spikerman’s limited edition book Ladybug Stomachs, and live letterpress printing demos in our fantastic new Letterpress lab. The program will culminate in the announcement of our scholarship winning students and our annual Hamaguchi visiting artist Lecture with celebrated print collaborative Dignidad Rebelde, Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes.
As artists-in-residence Barraza and Cervantes will produce a print honouring artist-activist movements in the Bay Area. 

We welcome the CCA Community to explore our new studios, reconnect with Print alumni, and discover works by our talented students for Hamaguchi Printmedia Week 2025. 

Hamaguchi Printmedia Week is curated by Anthea Black, Associate Professor, Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts.

Artist Lectures
Aimee Lee, co-presented with San Francisco Center for the Book and The CODEX Foundation, California College of the Arts

Dignidad Rebelde: Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes, California College of the Arts


Artist Intensives
Aimee Lee: tools-making & techniques for Korean Hanji

Courtney Sennish: Etching Masterclass and Moonlight Press shop talk

Dignidad Rebelde with Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes: screenprint editions honouring Bay Area activism


Printmedia Studio Opening
and Book Launch of Ladybug Stomachs by Zoe Spikerman

NO PLACE: Queer Geographies on Screen

 

A touring exhibition program that features the work of Canadian and international queer and trans-identified artists who examine ways in which queer notions of place, mapping, and geography are realized on screen. The works address the complex intersections of culture, orientation and geography, and together, they articulate queerness as "simultaneously everywhere and nowhere", echoing the dual meaning of utopia as both an ideal and non-existent place. The artists deal with issues such as migration, displacement, queer assimilation, and spatial politics. In some instances, the medium and mechanics of film and video itself becomes the subject of the work. The queerly re-embodied camera may be understood, for example, as an "orientation device" that documents the artist's position in relation to physical space.

The Norway presentation of NO PLACE for Small Projects presents film, video and sound works of 12 Canadian and international queer and transgender artists, with a focus on representations of islands, temporary residences, and movement between spaces to examine notions of self-determination, nomadism, sovereignty, and occupation. Their works link orientation with spatial politics in such geographically distant places as the West Bank of Palestine, the small community of Pangnirtung in Nunavut, Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Røst islands, Norway. The Tromsø exhibition is accompanied by a new two-part curatorial text: WE ARE NOT ISLANDS: on doing Queer Geographies from here / A ROLLING STONE GATHERS NO MOSS: a long-form territorial acknowledgement.

Artists
Sharlene Bamboat, Kajsa Dahlberg, James Diamond, Vanessa Dion-Fletcher, Ali El-Darsa, Elle Flanders and Tamira Zawatzky, Richard Fung, Dara Gellman and Leslie Peters, Guillermo Gómez, Peña and Gustavo Vazquez, Noam Gonick, Deirdre Logue, Mikiki, Elin øyen Vister, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, and b.h. Yael.

Exhibition tour
Small Projects, Tromsø, Norway, August 24 - September 22, 2o14.

Doubt It talk series at n/a, Oakland, California, May 4, 2014.

Meeting Places/Lieu de Rencontre International Conference, St Mary's University, Sackville, New Brunswick, September 2013.

The McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario, April 3, 2012.

Catalogue
36-page colour catalogue with curatorial essay, artist bios and descriptions of each work.
Published by The McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario

---

Acknowlegements
Thank you to all of the artists, James Patten, Director/Curator at the McIntosh Gallery, Christine Sprengler, Jamelie Hassan, and Wanda Vanderstoop, Kaherawaks Thompson, Mark Pellegrino, Erik Martinson, and Deirdre Logue at Vtape, Calder Harben, Tanya Busse and Jet Pascua at Small Projects Gallery, KM Mooney, Nicholas Sung at n/a Artspace.

Curated by Anthea Black, this video program explores appearances of craft and hand making in film and video from the 1960s to the present, where craft is a temporal process rather than a fixed object.

Artists
Charles and Ray Eames, Joyce Wieland, Kelly Egan, and the Colour Collective (Johanna Autin, Carissa Carman and Sarah Gotowka).

Exhibition
Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art, 2014, Carleton University Art Gallery.
Curated by Heather Anderson.