Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Artist Talk Review: Phillip Zimmerman

Book As Experience
Phillip Zimmerman started his love of books when he was in high school. After high school he went to architecture school and decided that being an architect was not what he wanted in his future so he went to pursue art. Many teachers including Nathan and Joan Lyons, Keith Smith, and Gary Frost taught him. He traveled all over the world ever since he was young and found inspirations everywhere he went. After college he started Space Heater Editions. He was very interested in a visual narrative with the books he was making. One of the first books that he made was The Cure in 1977, which was pressed. The next one that he made was The Rusty Plate in 1979. This book included an audiocassette, which he would do in some of his most famous works.
            One of his biggest pieces was very rich and very attention grabbing with emotional depth. He called it High Tension. He used very little words and very large pictures. The quotes that he used were all from the current DSM of that time when he made it. It was all about stress in the modern day and stress related symptoms. The book included six different layers so you could look at the book in many different ways. It teaches the reader how to alleviate stress and as you go through the book, the pictures and quotes get more and more ridiculous. He did this all by his own hand with a press and pictures that he took.
His work interested me because I am very into artist books. I like to see that people are still getting these books out there. Usually people look at these books maybe once in their lives and put it down and never read it again which makes them less popular than novels or educational books.

Questions: What will your next project focus on? How did you come across the idea to create a book about book burning?

No comments:

Post a Comment