Now showing!
Don't forget: we're more than just events. We've got three galleries up right now: For your reading pleasure, we present Women's Work, a chronological exploration of overlooked fiction by women, hand picked by Booksmith staff. If art is more your thing, we have Nikki McClure's beautiful die-cut illustrations (prints for sale!), and Adrienne Eberhardt's haunting, dreamy photos and self-portraits.
Come by on the weekend, enjoy a premium cocktail, and stroll through our collections.
Women's Work:
While men have been taking up all the space and getting all the press over the, oh, last couple dozen centuries or so, women have been busy writing some of the best books of all time. "Women's Work" is the cocktail party you wish you could throw for your favorite raucous broads. From erotica to satire, science to the avant garde, this is a cross section of the wild, brilliant, impolite things ladies have been getting up to on paper over the last few thousand years—in between raising kids and keeping the house nice. Come in and let your hair down. (Titles listed below.)
Nikki McClure:
Nikki McClure is a well-known cut-paper artist and the author of several children’s books, including Abrams’s Waiting for High Tide, In, Collect Raindrops, and May the Stars Drip Down. She lives in Olympia, Washington, with her husband and son. We've got archival-quality digital prints of her work, only one of each, on sale now. See some of McClure's beautiful work at this link.
Adrienne Eberhardt:
Emotional Science presents experimental and analog work Adrienne made as a teenager in her makeshift darkroom in St. Louis, Missouri. She will also be displaying a more recent series of self portraits entitled "Closer Still."
Adrienne’s technique may be described as a subtle interplay of the intentional and the accidental, which in turn reflects the cycle of disorder and reconstruction that characterize memory and life experience. By playing with light and texture, she allows the medium and method to interpret her subjects, often distorting individual features and rendering spaces ambiguous. The emotions explored have no definable shape and cannot be limited to the experience of one person; rather the purpose and process of her work is to remove forced definitions and expected categories to create an experience that is simultaneously recognizable and universal.
Her more recent body of work entitled "Closer Still" is a series of self portraits and represents two important firsts: using herself as a subject, and working in a digital medium. She painted exposed photographic paper and allowed the water and paint to dry in puddles, again letting time and randomness play a role in the formulation of the texture and final image. In "An Unusual Appearance of Light" the figure interacts with her environment by surfacing with clarity, arms raised up in a possible combination of surrender, exhibition, and confrontation. The figure appears to invite the viewer into a direct and mutual transmission of thought and feeling, and the distinct light surrounding the subject in this moment gives clues about what is before her. As with all of Adrienne’s work the exchange between subject and viewer is left ambiguous, inviting the viewer to explore the concept behind the process and his or her own possibilities of seeing.
Artist's Statement: The long, isolating gray winters growing up in Missouri were always a highly creative period for me. I spent so many days inside my darkroom, listening to music, looking at negatives and experimenting with image making. I was intrigued by the concept of photography: that light enabled an image to reflect off a mirror and record time. Many of the images I made represent 1-2 hour exposures of me literately standing in the dark with my enlarger dodging and burning parts of an image in to see what I could pull from it.
We are selling high-quality c-prints and giclee prints of Eberhardt's photos while they last.
The Bindery is open 2-10PM Monday through Saturday and 2-8PM Sundays. The Bindery bar is open during events, as well as all day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
