Books published by bd-studios.com

Composer-performer Michael Harren's multi-media performance The Animal Show blends humor with candor to convey the importance of keeping all animals safe from harm. Through stories, music, and video from his residency at Tamerlaine Farm Animal Sanctuary, The Animal Show takes the audience on a ride that will inspire us to think differently about our relationships with all kinds of animals. The Animal Book contains the entire text of the show along with performance photos, video stills, and stories of the show's tour and Harren's activism on the road.

Georgia Dusk is an autobiographical poetry and photography chapbook collaboration by Dudgrick Bevins and luke kurtis. Both born in Dalton, Georgia and raised in rural Appalachia, the poet's lives followed very different paths. Yet they both ended up in New York City where they eventually met for the first time. Upon discovering their common roots, the two poets developed a unique poetic bond. In Georgia Dusk, their contrasting literary and visual styles give way to poetic dialogue that explores themes of grief, longing, gratitude, pain, and joy against the simultaneous backdrops of their shared heritage and adopted home.

Train to Providence is a conversation between poet and photographer. Rodger Kingston's photographs were made over a sustained period of several decades, while William Doreski's poems were written in the short span of a few months. The pictures do not illustrate the poems, and the poems do not merely describe the photographs. But the words and images, brought together here for the first time, seem to have something to say to each other in ongoing, elongated moments caught and framed for close examination.

Jordan's Journey is a genealogical mashup incorporating photography, writing, design, research, and more. Gone are the boring register reports and dry descriptions found in genealogical tomes of old. Jordan's Journey takes a new approach, fusing together the creative and academic in a way that breathes new life into family history.The book is a lush, high-quality artist book that will be right at home on coffee tables everywhere. Equal parts genealogical memoir, art photography, and local history, Jordan's Journey pulls you in with a rich and immersive experience. With more than 75 original photos by the author, as well as over 150 vintage images, Jordan's Journey invites you on a trip into the rural south of yesteryear.

In his emotionally raw yet darkly hilarious Tentative Armor, Michael Harren combines piano, synthesizers, a laptop and live string players with his unique storytelling, resulting in a deeply moving, highly entertaining performance. In its book form, Tentative Armor captures Harren's resonant, powerful, very personal stories, and immerses the reader in a funny, poignant, highly intimate tour of his own self-discovery through spirituality, sexuality and grief. The entire text of the show is combined here with video stills from the show's premiere at NYC experimental performance landmark Dixon Place along with original photos by luke kurtis.

Sam Rosenthal first used the Internet as a confused and closeted gay teen who longed for an online escape from his offline reality. Rosenthal explores the alienation he experienced socially and the refuge he found on the Internet by appropriating images from real-time network cameras, known as "netcams." The cameras are accessed through unencrypted servers on the world wide web and are available to anyone with an Internet connection. Information such as geographic location and ownership of these netcams isn't provided, leaving the cameras without identity or clear intention. Yet, still, the artist sees them as an escape. "I believe I've visited these places even though I don't know where they are," he says.For Here Nor There, Rosenthal sought out camera feeds displaying uncanny scenes; the ones familiar and mundane, yet unidentifiable and dreamlike. The book features fantastical imagery of palm trees, pastel colors, and vibrant sunsets that conjure up feelings of an idealistic world. But Internet connections are imperfect and data loss often translates into visual flaws of pixelation and static, breaking those idealistic illusions. This assault of dropped packets disrupts the fantasy and grounds the images in reality. The Internet can never provide a permanent escape, leaving both the artist and his viewers lost somewhere in cyberspace, neither here nor there.

the immeasurable fold is an autobiographical poetry collection that explores the poet's trajectory from rural southern farm boy to life as a Greenwich Village artist. The poems recount memories of family, hurt, love, loss, joy, sadness, longing, and forgiveness all through the lens of a spiritual reckoning.Not a typical selected-works collection, nor exclusively new work, the immeasurable fold is based upon a manuscript of poems written in early 2000 titled lazy dreams and other memories. Though the full-length manuscript remains unpublished, in 2005 kurtis included a selection of those poems (along with a few newer ones) in his debut solo exhibition, for which he used the same title. bd-studios.com published a small, limited edition exhibition catalog of those poems and photographs. Long out-of-print, those poems, additional/unpublished poems from the original manuscript, as well as new poems written in the years since-altogether spanning a decade and a half, from 2000 through 2015-have been compiled in this new collection.

With more than 80 reproductions of his work, Retrospective is the first published overview of Michael Tice's career. The book spans over five decades from the 1970's to the present day. Tice's early works are rooted in a sort of domestic surrealism that evolves into a more complex exploration of male sexuality and gender roles. Many of his images can be seen as a critique of the "American dream." His enduring interests in the domestic space, childhood innocence, and cultural nostalgia combined with his masterful use of color and texture brings to light an American past that, perhaps, only existed within the surreal landscape of the viewer's mind to begin with.

In 1963, Allen Ginsberg traveled to Cambodia and visited the ancient Khmer temples. He wrote "Angkor Wat," an eponymous poem about the temple complex. It was a very different time: pre-Vietnam War, pre-Khmer Rouge, and before the bustling tourism trade that is now the lifeblood of Siem Reap. Yet the Angkor Wat temples themselves remain a unique source of inspiration for poets and photographers who travel there from all over the world.Over half a century later, Angkor Wat by luke kurtis is both the artist's homage to Ginsberg's text as well a celebration of his own pilgrimages to the ancient city. Published in 1968, Ginsberg's Angkor Wat book was a single long poem accompanied by photographs by Alexandra Lawrence. kurtis's book is a suite of poems paired with his original photography. Chronicling the poet's own travels where he explored mythical stories and experienced mystical visions, kurtis's poems take you on a tour of Angkor Wat (and beyond) unlike any other and tell the story of one American poet deepening his Buddhist spirituality.

INTERSECTION is a collection of poetry, photography, and found texts by luke kurtis created as part of the artist's rediscovery of his southern heritage. It's his self-described "ode to the south." Paired with the companion INTERSECTION zine, also published by bd-studios.com, the artist's rural upbringing is contrasted with his adult life as a New York artist.

The Language of History: A Greenwich Village Artist Remembers 9/11 is an intimate collection of work by interdisciplinary artist luke kurtis. The artist, a long time resident of Greenwich Village, witnessed the 9/11 attacks from the street near his home at 9th Street and 6th Avenue. This book collects a selection of his photography and writing created in response to the tragedy.