ECU Press

Publications

2010

Anna Ruth
Sensory Maps

Edited by David MacWilliam

Published by ECU Press in the Pile Driver Editions Series

Sensory Maps is a series of drawings by Finland-based artist Anna Ruth. The drawings record the artist’s travels and the movement of Vancouver buses over the course of a day, January 26, 2009, and were composed by allowing the vibrations of the vehicle to move a hand-held pen across a sheet of paper.

Anna Ruth grew up in Vancouver and is now living and working in Jyväskylä, Finland. She studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in the mid-1990s and graduated from l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Cornouaille in France in 1998. She exhibits her artwork internationally.

Sensory Maps is the first book in Pile Driver Editions, a new imprint of the ECU Press. Pile Driver focuses on books by artists and writers associated with the University.

Elizabeth McIntosh

Essays by Jan Verwoert and Monika Szewczyk

Published by ECU Press

“On the beauty of being bold, not blunt, and the audacity of realizing, in painting, that modernists were wrong to think that modernism was all about finding something final, but that, in effect, modernism much rather is about facing its challenges again, every day, in painting, in a manner that may be bold, not blunt, and, despite some agony, occasionally most joyful”
— Jan Verwoert

Through her work, McIntosh responds to Modernism, and specifically geometric abstraction, resisting the reverent nature of pure abstraction, through the constant tweaking of very subtle details.

This first monograph of Vancouver-based painter Elizabeth McIntosh features essays by Berlin based writer and critic Jan Verwoert, and Monika Szewczyk, head of publications for the Witte de With Centre for International Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

Elizabeth McIntosh has been producing and exhibiting paintings since the mid-nineties. She has exhibited widely in Canada and shown internationally. Her work resides in collections such as the National Gallery of Canada. McIntosh is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

Kota Ezawa
Odessa Staircase Redux

Edited by Kathy Slade

Co-published by ECU Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

Odessa Staircase Redux is a retroactive storyboard for Sergei Eisenstein’s montage sequence from The Battleship Potemkin. The first frame of every cut in the scene is re-drawn in black ink. The ensuing series of 158 drawings form a flipbook version of the film scene that highlights the vast number of cuts and the juxtapositions between neighboring shots. An accompanying booklet of archival films stills depicting a protest by UC Berkeley students against a House Un-American Committee meeting at San Francisco City Hall in 1961.

Kota Ezawa depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography, and popular culture and re-presents them as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes, and prints. The work’s paired down minimalist aesthetic helps to streamline Ezawa’s focus on the changing role of the camera and its effect on the viewers reception.

Kota Ezawa is a German Japanese artist born in Cologne and currently based in San Francisco. He has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, St Louis Art Museum, The Hayward Gallery in London, and the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver. His work is included in numerous public collections including Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Ezawa is represented by Murray Guy in New York, Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, and Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt.

2008

Andrew Dadson
Visible Heavens from 1850–2008

Edited by Kathy Slade

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

Visible Heavens from 1850–2008 is an artist book based on a found star map from 1850. The “original” map was photocopied and each subsequent copy was then re-photocopied. The artist likens the slow degradation of the image to the cultural shift within our interpretation of the stars (constellation charts were called maps of the heavens but after 1975 they became known as maps of the sky) and each photocopy represents a year in the decline from “heaven” to “earth”. From start to finish the map changes from an “accurate” vision of the stars above to an abstracted blackness depicting the new “heaven” in the year 2008.

Andrew Dadson is an emerging Vancouver-based artist. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery and has been included in group exhibitions in the US, China and Europe. Dadson is represented by Galleria Franco Noero in Turin, Italy.

2007

Euan Macdonald
Selected Standards

Edited by Euan Macdonald

Co-published by ECI Press, JRP|Ringier, and Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg

Selected Standards is an artist book that combines title pages from sheet music found in a second hand store in Los Angeles with drawings and aerial photographs of LA. The represented songs are hits from jazz musicals from the 1940s and 1950s and they range in theme from zany and wistful, to melancholic and existential. Some are well-known standards, while others are obscure. The song titles contain philosophical moments, familiar and peripheral experiences, some imagining a better world or offering a fleeting chance to escape the one we're in. When he first encountered the sheet music, Macdonald was intrigued by the narrative relationship that developed between the titles. With the exception of an addition, the title pages are presented in the order in which they were originally found. In the spirit of improvisation and free association, closely linked with jazz, Macdonald paired each song with drawings made in his studio as well as with aerial photographs of Los Angeles.

Euan Macdonald is a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles. He shows with Michael Zink Gallery in Munich, Galleria S.A.L.E.S. in Rome, Cohan and Leslie in New York, Jack Hanley in San Francisco, and Tracey Lawrence Gallery in Vancouver.

READ Edition 1

READ Edition 1 is a print portfolio featuring the work of Fiona Banner, Dan Graham, Brian Jungen, Myfanwy MacLeod, Jonathan Monk, Shannon Oksanen, Peter Piller, Frances Stark, Michael Stevenson, and Ron Terada. The Portfolio curators, Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade, invited ten international artists to respond to the theme of reading. Artists were encouraged to interpret the theme as concretely or abstractly as they wished. The result is an eclectic mixture of work as the artists responded in a variety of ways. READ Edition 1 has been published in an edition of 15.

More Information

2006

Rodney Graham
This is the Only Living I’ve Got (Don’t Take It Away From Me):
The Rodney Graham Songbook

Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade editors

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

This is the Only Living I’ve Got (Don’t Take It Away From Me): The Rodney Graham Songbook is a compilation of 37 songs from Graham’s CDs and records including The Bed Bug, Love Buzz, And Other Short Songs in the Popular Idiom, Getting it Together in the Country, Rock is Hard, and Never Tell a Pal a Hard Luck Story.

Graham‘s songs are transcribed into sheet music with musical notation for piano, guitar tablature and lyrics. Taking the form of a popular songbook, the book features images of the artist, his band, and new artwork. In addition the book contains a CD compilation of rare cover songs with two brand new tracks.

Vancouver artist Rodney Graham is an internationally acclaimed artist. He is known for literary and conceptual artworks, cinematic installations, costume dramas, and also as a singer-songwriter. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with projects such as Parsifal Score, Parsifal (1882-38,969,364,735), and School of Velocity, Graham began to make artworks whose central subject was music or the concrete objects of music such as musical scores and CDs. Since then, the line between his visual art practice and his music practice has become blurred and eventually conflates in works such as How I Became a Ramblin Man, Zabriskie Point and The Phonokinetoscope.

Sydney Hermant
Aunt Maud’s Scrapbook

Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade editors

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

Aunt Maud is a tertiary character from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel, Pale Fire. Little is known about Aunt Maud, she is described as a mediocre painter and scrapbook artist. Sydney Hermant creates a new life for this fictitious character by making Aunt Maud‘s Scrapbook in the form of an artist book. The development of the scrapbook is guided by events within the novel’s narrative, historical events that occurred during Nabakov’s writing of the novel, and events culled from Nabokov’s biography. Hermant takes us on a fractured reimagining of the life of Aunt Maud that winds through the Luddite Rebellion, oil crises in the Middle East, and a full-on Merman formal ball.

Sydney Hermant is a Vancouver based artist, writer and curator. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2000 her work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and in Tokyo. She has a BA in literature from Dalhousie University (1993) and studied at the Ecole Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1999). She was the Director/Curator of the Or Gallery from 2002 to 2005.

Tim Lee and Mark Soo
Modern Optical Experiments in Typography: Univers Ultra Light Oblique (1968)

Christoph Keller and Kathy Slade editors

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

This collaborative project by Mark Soo and Tim Lee formally pushes the boundaries of what a book is. The book is blank except for four printed pages containing the text ‘Think’, ‘Fast’, ‘Hip’, and ‘pies’ set in Univers. Focusing on the year 1968, the artists pull seemingly disparate events together. 1968 was an important year in hippie subculture and it was also around this time that Bruce Nauman made his seminal piece Pay Attention Fucker and the year Dan Graham wrote Eisenhower and the Hippies.

Tim Lee is a Vancouver artist with a growing international reputation. Since graduating from UBC in 2002, Lee has shown his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, the National Gallery in Prague, the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montréal, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Belgium. He has had solo exhibitions at the Or Gallery, YYZ in Toronto, Cohan and Leslie in New York, the Lisson Gallery in London, and Tracey Lawrence Gallery. Lee’s work is included in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London.

Mark Soo graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 2001. Since then, he has exhibited locally and internationally in group exhibitions at the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University in New York, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Westspace in Melbourne, the Western Front in Vancouver, and Cohan and Leslie in New York.

The Music Appreciation Society
The Music Appreciation Society Presents: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Brady Cranfield, Christoph Keller, and Kathy Slade editors

Co-published by ECI Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier

The Music Appreciation Society Presents: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is a CD compilation of songs recorded by local artists who are in bands and who use music in their practice. This project will make reference to the profound role popular music has played in the work of Vancouver artists in recent years. Contributing artists include: UJ3RKS (a legendary Vancouver new wave band that includes Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace as members), The Rodney Graham Band, Hello Blue Roses (Sydney Hermant and Daniel Bejar), Pink Mountaintops, The Book of Lists, Kevin Schmidt, Damian Moppet, and more.

Out of Print