stone canyon nocturne
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Walthamstow based designer Stephen Kenny, and curator Colin Ledwith met through a series of sleep deprived conversations after becoming new dads, and soon discovered they had a mutual interest in the legacy, history and quirks of hand printed pamphlets, flyers and political manifestos.
Stephen soon introduced Colin to his collection of rare antique wooden fonts, further compounding tentative thoughts between the two to develop a project located somewhere between an edition artwork and a poetry periodical – an intermittent endeavour which would invite artists and curators to exorcise half-forgotten flights of imagination left lying dormant in the back of a notebook.
A perverse idea formed: to conflate the ease of the global website and simple, fast distribution means twenty first century internet-based activity provides, with the production processes of the nineteenth - a painstakingly hand-set and printed type publication would be disseminated through a simple website and ‘just in time’ print methodology (basically, printing each issue sold... as payment is made, thus omitting the need for unit storage).
Taking its cue from Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s seminal magazine of experimental writing and concrete poetry 0 TO 9 (1967-69) and detouring via Bob Cobbing’s Writer’s Forum and his spoken word poem Kurrirrurriri* we imagine the printed page as an arena that the reader navigates. The words are obstacles, lures, street signs, prompts. The project exists between the architecture of the printed word, between the spaces of the spoken word and over time, seeking to examine the efficacy and claims of art's preoccupation with the 'real’.
Each issue of 9 TO 09: Stone Canyon Nocturne will concentrate on the work of a single invited artist, writer or curator, exploring individual concerns, themes and ideas through concrete poetry, cut-ups, anagrams, lists, word-plays or visual typography pieces using the antique letterpress fonts we have available. Each issue of our hand printed broadside will be made available for purchase at £15.00 per copy through this website, each issue will be limited in edition to 109 numbered copies. We will publish two issues at a time.