Flying Fish Press ~ California
(Julie Chen)

Panorama
By Julie Chen
Berkeley: Flying Fish Press, 2008. Edition of 100.

10 x 21 x 2"; 12 pages. Three foldout pages and two double-page engineered structures. Cloth-covered boards with paper titles on front board. Housed in matching cloth covered box with magnet closure.

Colophon: "Letterpress printed from wood blocks and photopolymer plates by Julie Chen and Alan Hillesheim, and assembled in the studios of Flying Fish Press by Julie Chen, Erin Latimer, and Kimi Taira. Special thanks to Erin Latimer for her stalwart support in the studio through the year-long process of birthing this book."

Panorama is a warning, a challenge, a clarion call to action. It begins with “You do not want to believe that time is running out” and ends with “What matters now is whether you will think beyond your own survival / And respond to the challenges that await you.”

Its five spreads present in a visual, tactile, and focused way the situation: You are here and now, and you are in denial; the earth’s environment is delicate and endangered; “everything is inextricably linked” and “your failure to change is having serious repercussions”; species are disappearing at an alarming rate; “your habitat is in peril.” What will you do?

As always with Julie Chen’s work, it begins with an elegant box, suggesting that what is inside can be contained. But once the pages begin opening, Panorama expands in two and then three dimensions. The problem is bigger, more complex, and more entwined than we might think.

And as always the craft and formal invention are lusciously overwhelming and yet on point. Three sections of the book demand physical interaction with a lift tab structure; two sections turn into grand — in both senses — sculptures (to call them pop-ups would be an injustice).

You might not want to hear what Panorama says; you might not believe what it purports; but if this doesn’t elicit at least an inward gasp, it may be too late for you anyway.
$2,400

Full Circle
By Julie Chen
2006. Edition of 100.

Rotating wheel in a 15" x 15" x 3" silk-covered box.

Full Circle — like so many of Julie Chen's bookworks — offers the sensation of being caught up in something at once momentous and personal. Another elegantly clothed, unmistakable Chenbox opens to reveal a marvel of execution and effect. Once again, Julie Chen takes physicality, an essential part of all books, and makes it a vital element of expression.

A spinning wheel — that the reader controls and rotates — suggests a clock, or progressive stations along some journey. The contents of the book are viewed by turning a wheel and pausing whenever text and image are centered in 4 windows. At 3 intervals a drawer lines up with the opening in the front of the box. Pulling a tab reveals a tongue-like 3-dimensional diagram of the mind and heart in relation to each other.

The subject? The clue is on the face of the top of the box: an array of intersecting circles hold phrases like "Things I was told to believe in," "Things I would like to believe in," "Things I used to believe in." Full Circle is about belief, or more pointedly, about cycles of belief.

As the wheel moves from stage 1 to stage 12 (12 stations?), the windows offer four different ways we can chart belief: a single word, objects, the image of a body part, a sentence. At station 1 are the single word INQUIRY, some tear-shaped egg-like objects, the image of a closed mouth, and the sentence "I look for you but you will not speak to me." At each stage the windows have new content. At each stop connections between the windows are left up to the reader. And, as the stages progress, so is the developing story. Full Circle demonstrates that the cycle of belief is the same for all, but different in the particulars.

Over and over, Chen's works have a foundation of social connection. Early in her career, the connection was in collaboration with others; lately, her works have insisted on reader/viewer participation, directly as in Personal Paradigms or now indirectly as in Full Circle.

Is it about how belief intersects with human relationships? Is it looking at religious belief? When queried, Julie Chen wrote, "the text if purposefully ambiguous about whether the main reference is religion or relationship. It's not exactly about either, but more about the daily cycles of belief that we go through all the time without even realizing it, but that make life bearable. Things such as believing that we will never get seriously ill or lose our jobs—can't happen to me, right? We don't actually have any control of these things, and have to rely on faith to not be swallowed up by anxiety all the time. The objects in the window aren't meant to have deep meaning in relationship to the text. Rather, they are like talismen, reminders or lucky charms — place markers for belief. I chose them because I liked the intuitive connections which are not easily explainable. I like the idea that viewers are searching for their own ideas of what the objects might mean."

The experience of Full Circle is the practical gloss on the bleak view — I can't go on, I go on — Beckett presented to the world 50 years ago in Waiting for Godot. Full Circle acknowledges the presence of ambiguity in our lives, but, most wonderfully, demonstrates that ambiguity and delight can co-exist.

Julie Chen's bookworks have always been lucid without being transparent, accessible without being simplistic. Her recent works, most pointedly True to Life and now Full Circle, offer evidence that memory is fluid and that getting though the day (and the night) calls for belief and the suspension of belief in an ongoing cycle.
$2100

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View
By Julie Chen
Berkeley, CA: 2006. Edition of 100.

6.25 x 13.625 x 4.625" cream and brown cloth box. A magic wallet structure: two books recount and process a dream and a shadow box offers the dreamscape. Written, illustrated, and designed by Julie Chen. Letterpress printed using a combination of photopolymer plates, wood blocks, and pressure plates, and assembled at the studios of Flying Fish Press.

Julie Chen: "Based on a personal experience of loss, View is a bookwork that deals directly with ideas of coming to terms with mortality. The piece includes two books that are housed in a compartmented box. After the books have been read, the box can be tilted forward to reveal a mesmerizing view of a miniature world."

"We dream the answers before we ask the questions."

$1,675

Personal Paradigms
A Game of Human Experience
By Julie Chen
2004. Edition of 100.

Game components housed in 15.5 x 11.25 x 4.75" cloth-covered box. Includes a letterpress printed game board and a multitude of laser-cut game pieces. Game board opens to 21 x 30".

Flying Fish Press: "This new bookwork by Julie Chen is by far the most ambitious and extravagant piece ever to be produced at Flying Fish Press. Personal Paradigms presents a truly interactive experience for the reader in the form of a game that is played and the results then recorded in a collaborative ledger book. The object of the game focuses on the player's own life experience and perceptions at the moment that the game is being played."
$2,100

True to Life
By Julie Chen
2004. Edition of 100.

9.75 x 15" case with tray for book and prop to showcase book. The hinged floor lifts to support the book in an upright position at an angle. Letterpress printed using a combination of pressure plates, woodblocks, and photopolymer plates. The image that appears on each page is one section of a long, continuous visual timeline that can never be viewed all at once. The page shows through a plexiglass window. There are twelve views of the "page" that are accessed by pushing upward on wooden handles. Sections of the next page will slowly slide into view over the previous page.

A visual and textual exploration of the vicissitudes of living. It shows life as a continuous process of change as truth, perceptions, memory and re-interpretation liquidly mix to form this sea of life.
$1,600

The Veil
By Julie Chen
2001. Edition of 100.

4.25 x 10.5" closed. Opens to a full width of 27 inches when opened for display. The book has magnets imbedded in the covers which allow it to be displayed in a circular, sculptural format. Presented in a sumptuous box with magnetic closure.

"The Veil" presents personal reflections inspired by the current political situation in the Middle East and the world. In carousel book format with shaped and intricately cut pages, the story unfolds in a richly beautiful, but strangely disquieting setting. With text and illustration by Julie Chen.
$725

Correspondence Course
By Nancy O'Banion
1993. Edition of 125.

6.5 x 9". Canson Vidalon, Coventry Rag, and Elephant Hide papers. Typefaces: Gill Sans Condensed & Kaufmann. Card images screen printed by Thomas Wojak. Letterpress printed. In paper-covered slipcase.

A feast of text and image, visual and language puns, using cards slipped into pocket pages so that they can be swapped back and forth. Set up in sections as a textbook with divider pages & tabs. Contents: Foreword; Philosophy; World Studies; Household Arts: Transportation; Health Care: Life Science; Social Studies; Afterwords.
$795

Objects / Encounters:
Bookworks at Flying Fish Press 1987-2001
By Connell Gallagher and Cynthia Imperatore
Burlington: University of Vermont, 2002.

8 x 9"; 48 pages. Catalog design by Julie Chen. Photography by Sibila Savage. Bound by Cardoza James Bindery. Printed by Coast Litho. Letterpress covers designed and printed by Julie Chen.

Descriptive essays of Julie Chen's work by Connell Gallagher and Cynthia Imperatore. Features seventeen color images of her books, plus two black-and-white views of the Flying Fish Press studios. Includes a checklist of books.
$35 (Only a few copies remaining)

Flying Fish Press Out of Print Titles:
• Leavings
• Bon Bon Mots
• Domestic Science
• Evidence of Compression
• LifeTime
• Listening
• Ode to a Grand Staircase (For Four Hands)
• Octopus
• Radio Silence
• Space-Time Geometry
• St Ostrich in Manhattan
• (In)Versions