The Time After by Doug Fogelson

“Our visual life is spent in the center of a nearly hemispheric transparent shell whose distance from us we fixate. The rest of the world is a jumble of subliminal double images.”
-Paul Shepard (on binocular vision, from Man in the Landscape 1967)

Front Forty Press is pleased to announce our newest title, The Time After, which uses temporality to stimulate a deeper consideration of the “post climate change” era. Photography by Doug Fogelson and design by Tim Hartford are woven with essays from Derrick Jensen, Eiren Caffall, and Bridgette R. McCullough Alexander, as The Time After speaks to our changing understanding of the human role in the environment.

Contrasting familiar built scenes and rich natural images; The Time After brings readers on a quick visit to planet Earth. A globalized humanity is portrayed in contrast with elemental and seasonal cycles. Speculative and poetic essays combine seamlessly with the images and design to display a new angle on activism in contemporary art practice.

For over a decade Doug Fogelson has been investigating natural and constructed worlds via an iconoclastic multiple exposure photography style. His images catalog ephemeral forms of clouds, ocean waves, plant life, urbanism and human beings in unique time/space signatures along rolls of film. Working in these spaces Fogelson’s images record real life phenomena in a calculatedly abstract way.

The images are created as a result of overlapping exposures in a linear progression along the film inside the camera (not collaged or digitally combined). The compositions depict a study of time, perspective, and space as the scenes correspond and layers multiply allowing viewers to become enmeshed in the visually variegated form. Shooting in this manner the photographer exploits the camera’s mechanics to discover something between motion picture and still photography. Fogelson often shifts vantage points or shoots subject matter that is in motion, so a cognitive sense of the subject becomes rooted in time as well as memory and vision.

Presented in a horizontal format, this hardcover 216-page book is a rare gem. A limited edition of 2,000 copies was printed in this first run.

Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture

Front Forty Press is pleased to present Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture. This timely volume features two visual gallery sections replete with diverse and engaging imagery by over sixty world-class artists. A comprehensive section of writings and transcripts on the notion of end times as well as rapturous themes along with two full-length audio CDs complete the book’s presentation.

Delving into the subject matter via visual art, writings, and audio works, Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture explores the dichotomy of its thesis in a streamlined, functional presentation. More than sixty-five reproductions fill two galleries with each image featured on its own for unencumbered contemplation. Artists presented include well respected icons such as Bill Viola, Ed Ruscha, Richard Misrach, Fred Tomaselli, Julie Mehretu, the Starn twins, Zhang Huan, Will Cotton, Julie Heffernan, Desiree Dolron, Andrew Schoultz, Emilio Perez, Till Gerhard, Ellen Kooi, Simmons & Burke, Robert Ryman and many more.

Essays, interviews, and a poem introduce the book's thesis relative to the spiritual, environmental, political, and sociological implications of the subject matter. A provocative essay from Christopher Bucklow, full transcripts from National Public Radio’s Worldview program on the end of the world including interviews with many well known experts, and a poem from Jay Michaelson comprise the written matter. Two full-length audio discs contained in the book provide a selection of avant garde sound in twenty-one tracks. The audio artists include bands such as Sonic Youth, OM, SunnO))), Yakuza, Zelienople, Death Unit, Jana Hunter, Matteah Baim, and others.

This elegant hardcover book is sold as a numbered limited edition run of two thousand copies. It is a must have for anyone drawn to the hybridized worlds of visual and critical culture.  Look for the feature exhibition of select visual art and sound from Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture scheduled for Summer 2009 at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago as well!

Front Forty Profiles No. 1: Mark McGinnis

"The images in this book allude to words and expressions concerned with issues such as energy, war, political power, and propagandistic discourse. These eloquent icons are purposed in opposition to words that have become excessively iconic. Their purpose, in fact is to demystify a public discourse that tends too often to be schematic and Manichean... (These) images seem to fight back with the same weapons of simplification and immediacy, while recovering the complexity lost in the media's daily banalization of the news."
-Carlo Vinti (Art and Design Historian)

Front Forty Profiles Series is a new series of accessible and affordable soft cover books devoted to remarkable contemporary artists working in various mediums from around the world.

Front Forty Profiles Series No. 1 features American artist/designer Mark McGinnis—whose work has appeared in solo exhibitions in both Chicago and Los Angeles and has been published in The New York Times and Business Week. McGinnis uses drawing, printmaking and digital processes to create humorous iconography composed of poignant, simplified images that skew preconceptions of popular social and political issues.

McGinnis's studio practice contributes to an "effort to rethink graphic design," proposing it as a cultural practice autonomous from the client-based industry.” –Carlo Vinti (from the book) McGinnis’s commercial and personal work share much of the same process and language, but the latter demonstrates a much deeper authorship over content and context as he translates his work from the printed page to the gallery walls and even out into the street.

This soft cover 120-page book includes an interview with the artist conducted by art writer and critic Victor Cassidy and an essay on McGinnis’s technique and inspiration by art and design historian Carlo Vinti. Also included with the first volume of the Profiles series is a limited edition icon sticker by the artist.

$20.00

Buy online HERE

Matt Volla’s Unruly Drawings

Front Forty Press teamed up with Matt Volla to produce his first book entitled Unruly Drawings. Unlike the established mode of blind collaborations between artists, Front Forty Press has been working closely with Volla to develop this visually rich feature. Matt Volla’s Unruly Drawings were initially received as thousands of digital files as well as in various densely packed notebooks. The digital files were organized and named by Mr. Volla in a range of categories from his Lexicon. Designer Dan De Los Monteros and art director Doug Fogelson adapted the story of the drawings into this book’s visual depiction of their progression. In illustrating the book, De Los Monteros was faced with the challenge of balancing multiple individual characters and groupings through many stages of development and evolutionary flux.

Oakland based artist, musician, teacher, and surfer Matt Volla has been obsessively drawing amorphous kinetic creatures for years. These creatures were born into small-enclosed room like spaces where they bounced and slithered off the walls. They began to move faster and faster, growing and changing as they morphed and expanded beyond the walled boundaries. In our collaborative book, FFP has created a universe in which the drawings can evolve, flourish, have rave parties and battles, find solace, have existential crisis, animate, and become self-aware in the many ways they like.

Volla received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Art with an emphasis in Sound Art and Sculpture. He received an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College in Oakland, CA. He has shown throughout America in solo and group shows including White Columns in New York City, Tangent Gallery in Detroit and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His film soundtracks have screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Matt teaches film studies and sound art and drives to the beach in his vegetable oil-powered vehicle.

Unruly Drawings was concieved and produced by Doug Fogelson and Matt Volla. Designed by Dan De Los Monteros with an essay written by Yerba Buena Center Associate Curator Berin Golonu.

Berin Golonu has been the Associate Curator of Visual Art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco since 2003. She first encountered Volla’s work in 1997 when she received an assignment to review a solo show of his “Knotology” work in Artweek Magazine. Golonu recently curated Volla’s project “Bartology” into a group exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts titled Sampling Oakland.

ISBN: 978-0-9778689-1-9
Edition of 2000.

$20.00

Buy online HERE

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