Futurity Library: Disobedient Artists' Books in the Postbook Age @ San Francisco Center for the Book
The Bay Area has long been fertile ground for technological innovation and artistic experimentation—a fitting origin for an exhibition that takes the artist book as its site of inquiry.
Futurity Library: Disobedient Artists' Books in the Postbook Age frames the artist book as an evolutionary object: a form capacious enough to absorb new technologies, shed familiar structures, and persistently question its own conventions.
Curator bex ya yolk brings together artists working across a provocative range of materials and methods, from the handmade to the high-tech, each pushing on the boundaries of what a book can structurally, conceptually, and experientially be. Spanning material innovation and conceptual provocation, from 3D-printed structures to works that abandon the codex altogether, this exhibition collectively asks what the book is, and what it might yet become.
Exhibiting Artists
Colette Fu, Diagonal Press / Tauba Auerbach, Kate Conlon, Kristoffer Ørum, Myungah Hyon, Neta Bomani, Noam Youngrak Son, Sonnenzimmer / Nick Butcher, Nadine Nakanishi, Rujuta Rao, Stephanie Simek, THUNGRY / bex ya yolk
About the Curator
bex ya yolk (they/them) is a visual artist, graphic designer, bookmaker, and adjunct professor based in Chicago, IL. yolk received a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in Book Arts as a full merit scholar. yolk is the founder of THUNGRY — a practice, publishing initiative, and artists' book bindery complicating traditional ways of book building and semantics through experimentation and queering praxis. yolk utilizes the confines and structure of the codex, fundamental principles in design, and exploratory methodologies in sculpture to activate, interrogate, speculate, and disrupt what we've come to understand qualifies a Book and whom it may serve.
With a generative, multi-year research practice rooted in reproductive rights, histories, and design, yolk focuses on the philosophy of "the maternal" as a theology, a practice, and a logic to live by. As socio-political landscapes evolve in regards to what is acceptable, legal, and safe for AFAB and queer people, yolk interrogates and boldly addresses what could come of our collective futurity. Through sculptural practices, independent publishing, and the book as an art object, yolk mines subgenres of the maternal complex— including care work, abortion access activism, reproductive justice, health care disparities in the U.S., and container technologies — making visible the intersectionalities between the book in form and the bodies this research pertains.