The Riso Book: San Francisco
Colpa, in collaboration with Publication Studio Oakland and Kadist San Francisco presents The Riso Book: San Francisco, the third installment of a traveling publication project and exhibition between Los Angeles, Portland, Detroit, Marfa, New York, and San Francisco. The series standardizes the conditions of production underlying artist publications and presents the book as exhibition. The Riso Book , inspired by the format of Seth Siegelaub and Jack Wendler’s 1968 Xerox Book , is a geographic survey of contemporary artists with similar practices across several cities. In San Francisco, 5 artists will work over the course of five days at Kadist, using the Risograph as a tool. Each artist is given 20 pages within the monochromatic 8.5 x 11 inch book. All 100 pages will be bound into a single publication in an edition of 100, to be presented for sale at Kadist on Saturday, June 14th. Originally created on a Xerox machine and duplicated through a lithographic process, The Xerox Book , published by Seth Siegelaub and Jack Wendler afforded each artist twenty-five pages, plus a cover / title page, to execute a site specific project for the publication. The artists included were Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Lawrence Weiner. The publication itself functioned as the exhibition rather than a documentation of these site specific projects. The Riso Book takes its name from the Risograph, a printer/duplicator manufactured in Japan. The original is scanned through the machine and a master is created, by means of tiny heat spots on a thermal plate burning voids (corresponding to image areas) in a master sheet. This master is then wrapped around a drum and ink is forced through the voids in the master. Because the Risograph uses real ink rather than toner, each image looks hand-made. Featuring Anthony Discenza, Vincent Fecteau, Mitzi Pederson, Will Rogan, May Wilson