Book Club
Season 1 2019 - 2020 / Collaboration with Phillip Andrew Lewis, books selected by Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar
Book Club is a call and response experiment that encourages improvisation, collaborative inspiration, and exploring the freedom of extremely tight creative deadlines. The first season took place over eleven weeks from the end of 2019, through the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The participants were four artists; Melissa Catanese & Ed Panar, and Phillip Andrew Lewis & Lenka Clayton. This page shares responses made by Phillip and Lenka.
Once a week each duo presented a book to the other. By the end of the week each collaborative made something in response to the book, taking some aspect of the books physical form or content as a starting point. Sometimes there were multiple responses.
Book 01 / Sleep, Michael Putnam / pages rephotographed over a lightbox so the images on both sides of the page merge into one plane
Book 02 / The Voyage of Discovery, Carly Steinbrunn / all the books in the house examined for images of rocks, laid out in order of size
Book 03 / Silence, John Cage / book given to an nine year old who was asked to use it to make all sounds possible
Book 03 / Silence, John Cage / two training videos to teach the backwards alphabet
Book 04 / Interiors 1973 - 1974 Robert Adams (print portfolio) / replica portfolio, photographs sourced from local houses currently for sale
Book 05 / Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino / all text from the entire book removed, leaving only the existing annotations
Book 06 / Domestic Scandals, Takashi Yasumura / compiled found footage of factory tours that make objects depicted in the book
Book 07 / Immaterialism / Graham Harman / two cotton, 3d applique cushions, that manifest the digital pattern on the book cover
Book 08 / Concorde, Wolfgang Tillmans / video, take off from a concorde
Book 09 / Films, Paul Graham / film, reanimated scans from the book
Book 09 / Films, Paul Graham / book-object scans
Book 10 / TTP, Hayahisa Tomiyasu / video, process description below
1. We decided to look for the ping pong table depicted in TTP.
2. By reading several interviews online we found out that Hayahisa Tomiyasu was in Leipzig from 2012 - 2016 to attend HGB, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst.
3. We found the addresses of the sixteen HGB student residences in the city.
4. Using Google Earth we examined the surroundings of each building. Knowing that he made his photographs from the eighth floor, we focussed our search on the thirteen buildings that were eight stories or more high. We looked for the soccer fields, running track, indoor swimming pool and sand pit, he described in his introduction.
5. On the second to last student residence, we found the soccer fields, running track, indoor swimming pool, the sand pit, and the ping pong table. It was shocking and familiar to finally see it.
6. The Google Image photographs we found in January 2021 were made in August 2008.
7. In these images, examined three years after TTP was published, we see the ping pong table before Hayahisa Tomiyasu ever saw it.
8. We captured the process of looking for it in video. As soon as we found it, the video reached 13 gigabytes – all of the memory available on the computer – and it immediately crashed.
9. Today we made images of the windows of his apartment building that he looked out of for four years, four years before he arrived in it.
10. Today we remembered that we set game cameras up in the view we stare at every day behind our own building, and have never looked at the photographs.
Book 11 / Useful Photography, Erik Kessels / we searched our phones to find images only made to communicate functional information