We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Oh, what we’d give to visit the studio of Bianca Hester! Hester is an artist/handywoman/creator across all platforms living output is so varied and so unexpected that we can’t quite wrap our heads around the whole of it.

For starters, Hester makes and modifies instruments, orchestrates fruitful installations and collaborations, produces lovely art books, writes with great insight, creates video, turns leftover installation materials into light fixtures for her friends, and, need we say it…MUCH MORE.

Holy smokes, Ditto Press is so cool we could plotz. The UK-based independent publisher produces the most beautiful books imaginable using Risograph technology (do we sense a growing sector of Risograph devotees?) and incredible bookbinding techniques. The shop and blog are practically epilepsy-inducing in its variety and desirability, offering books that range on topics including academia, fine art, photography, popular culture, literature and poetry. Zoinks? Zoinks.

Selected highlights include a revisited Edgar Allen Poe story (designed and produced in-house), prints by WLYS favorite Jiro Bevis, a limited edition book by Joseph Clayton Mills, “Herschel’s Telescope”, a 2-color riso printing for Laurence Barber with exposed-sewn single page sections and 9 digitally produced gate-folded inserts…and so much more.

Luke Ramsey’s zines, prints, drawings and collaborations (like the above collection of monster mug shots executed with Finlay Pogue) could keep an attentive viewer absorbed for days on end.

But there’s more! Along with his wife Angela Conley, Ramsey runs Islands Fold, an independent publisher and artist residency on Pender Island, B.C., Canada, founded in 2006. Available for purchase at the website are a multitude of prints, drawings, shirts and zines, the proceeds of which go directly toward funding the residency. Good work, guys!

Among the standard bits of information embedded within artist/filmmaker/writer Luca Dipierro’s biography is the sentence, “His life is based on a true story.” Cool! We love ontological riddles as much as the next guy/girl, and Dipierro’s work is studded with them in the darndest places.

There’s a lot to explore on Dipierro’s website. We recommend starting with the ART section, moseying on over to the FILM segment, and ending up with a tour of the WRITING archive. Neat stuff abounds—and it’s always refreshing to stumble upon a genuine polymath.

Mike Billington’s zines are pastel-covered manuals of how to live in a world where there’s just not enough white space. Billington’s little vignettes and aphoristic/humorous drawings are rendered in a chicken-scratch scrawl that is sometimes opaque and sometimes cacklingly rad, in perfect correlation with the words conveyed. Check out snippets from the zines here.

Looking for a one-stop shop for all your zine and small-press book needs? Search no further than Famicon Express, which deserves permanent status on the ole’ bookmarks list.

The shop provides a vast selection of comics, special projects books, travel adventures, ghost stories, prints inspired by Grand Theft Auto imagery, and more, all of which are immaculately designed and many of which feature special crafty bonuses (like hand-pulled silkscreen covers or neat stitching).

We’re suckers for crafty bonuses. Who isn’t!?

Eastside Projects is an artist-run space and public gallery in Birmingham, UK. The group commissions experimental contemporary art and hosts rad exhibitions as part of a project to serve the public good. Cool, no? The current exhibition is a collection of work by the London-based artist group known as hobbypopMUSEUM, who specialize in site-specific installations that combine sound, performance, film, and painting.

Eastside Projects has also released a bunch of awesome publications (above is an excerpt from Keith Wilson’s “What is Industry?”) including beautiful exhibition catalogs. Drop by if you’re lucky enough to be in the hood, or explore the website if you’re not. Either way, a productive experience.

Heart On Stage is a book-length collaboration between a Brazilian artist and illustrator (Luiz Risi) and a Finnish writer (Leena Yliportimo). The aim of the book isn’t simply to pair illustrations with poems, but rather to meld the two into a mutually-informative data stream that provides both intellectual and visual pleasure. A heady goal, but, from the looks of it, one that’s bound to be successful.

The project started with 400 poems “and the will to do something entertaining with them,” in the words of the two masterminds, both of whom currently live and work in Amsterdam. Check out the book’s progress here.

Svartkonst— the Swedish curators of art and culture whose magazine and website we refer to constantly for inspiration—has now released Grim Pseudonym, a zine by artist Patrick Kyle. The full-color publication comes in a numbered edition of 99 and is available for order from the Svartkonst page. Another thing: it looks rad.

Adam Gnade’s (say it “guh-nah-dee”) describes his work as “a series of books and records that share characters and themes”, in which fiction and song mingle in an attempt “to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life.” Solid theory, no? What this looks like in practice is equally as exciting.

First there’s “The Darkness to the West”, Gnade’s 42-page novella zine which you can scope out at our favorite zine distro, Microcosm. Then there’s “Hymn California”, a full-length novel that wound up a bestseller at Powell’s Books. Gnade also records cassettes on a 4-rack machine and has a CD called “The Wild Homesick”, which he calls a “strange, warm, troubled summer record full of doom and affirmations.” So much good work emanating from one soul is always an inspiration.