Moon Viewing: Megaliths by Moonlight
Published by Marquand Books, Seattle, September 2014
Distributed by D.A.P.
Introduction by Barbara Yoshida
Essay by Lucy R. Lippard
Foreword by Linda Connor
Hardcover, 8.75 x 11.25 in.
80 plates / 39 color photographs
Edition of 500
Website: www.moonviewingmegalithsbymoonlight.com
Email: barbarayoshida@moonviewingmegalithsbymoonlight.com
$35.00
Representing ten years of travel and research, Moon Viewing: Megaliths by Moonlight surveys megalithic stones from Sweden to West Africa and east to Armenia. Night photography emphasizes the relationship to stars and planets.
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Knot Nots: A Fairytale
Text by Amy Hufnagel
Four photogravure prints by Barbara Yoshida
Designed by Renate Gokl
Self-published by the artists in an edition of 100, New York 2000
7 unbound pages in a portfolio wrapping of handmade paper
Typeset in Spectrum, an oldstyle typeface designed by Jan van Krimpen, and printed
on Mohawk Superfine paper
Telephone: 212-966-0816
e-mail: yoshida.barbara@gmail.com
$750.00
Knot Nots: A Fairytale is a poetic fable by Amy Hufnagel, inspired by Barbara Yoshida's four linked photogravures.The heroine, "an elderly child," is on a post-modern feminist quest. In classic fashion she is lost in the woods, or, in this case, "in an almost non-existent forest at the edge of a megalopolis." Confused by the chaos of the information age, she encounters and receives rather Alice-in-Wonderland-style "guidance" from a vulva-shaped knothole in a tree, a plastic Barbie, a talking pighead, an "animal woman" in a rabbit mask, and a snake. These echoes of ancient sacred mythologies deliver their wisdom in a down-to-earth style full of sly art world references (Annie Sprinkle, Janine Antoni), and puns ("Hello, I'm looking for the Beuys room?"). The contemporary contradictions our modern heroine faces are not so much resolved as transcended by the sheer loveliness of the presentation.
It is difficult in a short review to convey the beauty of this collaboration of three talented artists. Of the four exquisite, somewhat surreal photographs, three are staged using props, two with a nude model. They subtly change color, becoming more fleshly pink as the text progresses and the questing woman evolves to be more integrated in her artistic, philosophical and sensual outlook. The prints have a dreamy archaic quality in spite of their twenty-first century subject matter: their small size, their look of hand-coloring and the somewhat Victorian medium of the photogravure, give a romantic cast to images that have a contemporary explicitness. The lines of the text, on facing pages, occasionally break out of their normal margins rather dramatically, echoing the restlessness of our heroine's thoughts as she strives to expand beyond her own accustomed borders. The attention to design detail extends to the portfolio cover which suggests tree bark, one of the book's visual themes.
This collaboration by three fine artists is a serious yet playful response to the many problems and contradictions troubling contemporary women, particularly women artists who must function on so many different levels at once. It is certainly a political, feminist work, yet makes its statements through beauty, poetry and humor. It deserves to become a treasured collector's item.
Review by Diane Miller
Printmaking Today , Vol. 10 No. 4, Winter 2001