From ancient up to modern times, the Orient to the Occident, palms are revered as wondrous plants of strange beauty, with lush coconuts and dates dangling from their dreadlock fronds.
Jonathan Martin assembled an unlikely anthology of drawings consisting of the unspoken, phantasmal aspects of being a palm. To be exact, a palm in the brains of a sharp-witted, moony collector of comprehensive socio-cultural myths, philosophies, folk tales and superstitions.
His book is a sober celibration of the manifoldness of the arcane phenomenon called Arecaceae (or simply palm tree), a trip through Mesopotamia, ancient temples, hieroglyphs, the I Ching, Samarra, Egyptian dance and cryptic occultations at a palm's hands.
Martin finds jokes in flat depictions of belief, the unavailing, the mystical and the wryly, and is equally fond of screwy allusions. Informed by an unsentimental nostalgia for American heritage, outer space, ethnography and religion, Martin's book explores the mystery of a tree, by embedding it in a star map wherein he confronts the Evangel with pop culture, Zen with contemporary art and the Qur'an, and not to forget the fixed coordinate Neil Young (who you'll find in a tree trunk).
> Jonathan Martin - okmambo.com
* New release * March 25th 2013 – A Book Of Palms by Jonathan Martin
Papenbroock's work is a delicate dance of un-framing. Genres seem to orbit, occur, disappear and recur like part of an eerie clockwork or an etude.
The film often reads as visual music further complicating the notion of a purely framed viewing. You can tell she is aiming at relieving history of the burden of reason, and relieving film of the weightiness of genre.
With a sensitivity to the pervasive force of myths, narration, poetic dialects and idioms, faces, archetypes, and ancestry in daily life, her portraits of rumpled faces, fantastic tales, drunken delusions, pastoral stillness, and rural goofiness effectively blur into the single face of an era that contains both its exterior and interior dimensions.
With tenderness and an often weird sense of humor, she supplies for a synaesthetic film experience speaking through formal openness as much as through its gorgeous subject matter.
Jason Grier, musician and producer
Times is an annual publication concerned with memory and representation. The first edition of Times, The Puzzling Almanac, is a pictorial atlas arranged according to a calendrical structure.
365 photographs from the early 19th to the early 20th century were assembled to a book, enabling the reader to embark on time travels through unlikely associations between scientific inventions, ancient discoveries and past current affairs. The blatant staging of the photographs that have become constituents of our collective memory, reveal the futility of objectifiable, transhistorical systems of measurement and documentation. We are always dealing with genealogical, indexicalized representations, or in less fancy words, with storytelling.
The cyclical notion of the calendar installs the photographs in the realm of the clockwork of the skies, an ongoing movement that allows brief glimpses of time, yet as soon as we have realized, they have already escaped our grasp and disappeared into something scientists have described as an ever-expanding, strange spiral.
France
&: Daviet-Thery
7L
Colette
Florence Loewy
Jeu de Paume
Le Bal book
Librairie du Palais de Tokyo
OFR System
Section 7 Books
Yvon Lambert
Germany
25 Books
Archive Kabinett
B Books
Bücherbogen
C/O Berlin
Do you read me ?
Kisch & Co.
Motto Berlin
Proqm
Sautter und Lackmann
Walter König
United Kingdom
Aye Aye Books
CCA-Center for Contemporary Arts
The Fruit Market Gallery