Books published by Radius Books

"A comprehensive monograph spanning the forty-year career of Palm Springs-based, queer artist Jim Isermann (born 1955), this title shows the artist's first twenty years of extensive, chronological research of postwar art and design filtered through popular culture and consumerism, followed by twenty years of site-specific public projects and a studio practice of labor-intensive painting, sculpture, and the occasional product design project. In 1980, there were no guidebooks to California design or what we now call Midcentury Modern. Isermann constructed his own timeline, object by object, from thrift stores, flea markets and swap meets, making bodies of work that included latch hook rugs paired with painting, stained glass window panels, and handsewn fabric wall hangings. By 1999, Isermann had his first computer, and so began the second twenty years of his career, with complex digitally designed patterns that found their form in commercially manufactured modules"--

The work of photographer and Rhode Island School of Design professor Steven B. Smith (born 1963) chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate, wrote of his work, "Smith's images record not so much a contrast as two violent absences joining as a single force. Landfill, seedling, turnabout, heating coil collude with the sky and mountains in a triumph of disproportion: scale not so much confused or lost as irrelevant." Steven B. Smith: Your Mountain Is Waiting documents the accelerating suburbanization of Smith's native Utah. Peeling back the layers of westward expansion with equal parts subtlety and irony, Smith captures the new McMansions springing up against the rocky, rust-red mountains and deep blue skies of the West. Smith is equally attentive to the cast of characters that fill these new landscapes--the people that build them, and the people that live in them.

Brad Temkin brings attention to the visual and ecological beauty of the transformation of water, by showing the structures and processes that most people do not even think about. Most storm water runoff is considered waste; yet more than 700 cities reclaim and re-use wastewater and storm water with combined sewer systems, recycling it for agricultural uses and even drinking water. As we mimic nature and separate the impurities like sludge or salt or chemicals, a transformation occurs. Temkin believes it matters less what each structure really is used for, or whether the water in his pictures are pure or waste. He is drawn instead to the strangeness of these forms and the distorted sense of scale. Moving beyond mere description, he embraces the abstract and at times surreal landscape of water transformation.

Linn Meyers is best known for her intricate line-based paintings and drawings, and her large-scale installations. This book provides a comprehensive survey of site-specific wall drawings in museums and galleries since 2000, as well as the detailed preparatory drawings and plans created by the artist for these projects, plus recent paintings that inform, and are informed by, the site-specific works. Meyers's large projects require a great deal of endurance and involve drawing in the gallery space over the course of days, sometimes weeks or months, accumulating lines into dense and intricate compositions. The scale of these projects allows Meyers to respond to the existing architectural features, magnifying the wholly committed performativity of her process. On Meyers' exhibition for The Hammer Museum, Senior Curator Anne Ellegood wrote, "The sense of being present while viewing the work is also amplified at this larger scale, allowing viewers to experience the work not just visually but also physically. To see a wall drawing is to be surrounded by it and to feel oneself to be part of the work."

The latest project from New York-based photographer Renate Aller includes mountain peaks from six continents. These photographs were taken from locations as high as 22,500 feet (adjacent to Mount Everest) to the European glaciers and mountain peaks of her childhood vacations. The subject matter is monumental, yet the images connect the viewer in a way that is not overpowering. Similar to the sand dune images from 'Ocean Desert', the artist engages us with these giants in all their detail, the veins and textures of the rocks in their constantly transient state. Aller isolates the mountain from its expected surroundings, using and presenting the familiar and the known in an intimate way, relating to parallel realities from different locations, opening up conversations between the different (political) landscapes in which we live /

In 2011, Arizona-based photographer Betsy Schneider, herself the mother of a 13-year-old daughter, embarked on a project to explore the experience of being 13.Traveling around the United States, the Guggenheim grant recipient spent 2012 chronicling 250 13 year olds, creating still portraits and video documentation of each. The resulting body of work creates a rich collective portrait of a group of Americans whose lives began at the turn of the millennium and who are coming of age now.To Be Thirteen depicts all 250 portraits with brief quotations from the extended video interviews and an interview by Center for Creative Photography Chief Curator Rebecca Senf with Schneider, unpacking details about the artist's process, insights about the project and how it changed her, as well as longer excerpts from the subjects. This publication captures and conveys the experience of meeting with the artist and looking through a stack of prints with her, and will complement an exhibition of the project debuting at the Phoenix Art Museum in the spring of 2018.

Rift' refers to the eastern edge of the North American Plate where it meets the Eurasian Plate along the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. New crust is formed as magma pushes up from the mantle; the land along the rift is unstable and raw. Marion Belanger (born 1957) documents this land and its structures: geothermal electricity, hot pools, volcanic excavation sites, houses, new earth and cultural relics within the landscape. In 'Fault', meanwhile, she photographs the shifting western edge of the North American Continental Plate along the San Andreas Fault in California, focusing on traces of the tectonic plate edge and the artifacts of our built environment upon them. Though characterized by earthquake activity, the landscape is often striking in its visual normalcy. Capturing moments of anticipation in settings that shift between the wild and the contained, 'Rift/Fault' creates a visual tension that questions the relationship between geologic force and the limits of human intervention.

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Miki Kratsman (born 1959) has worked as a photojournalist in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades. Originally created in the context of daily news, his photographs look at both "wanted men"--Individuals sought by the Israeli state--and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a "suspect." Kratsman has also provoked long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their "fate." This complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer. A text by Ariella Azoulay explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman's subjects, and a supplemental booklet contains hundreds of portraits and evocative messages from Kratsman's Facebook project.

Scouring the fallow landscape around the Llobregat river and the Rubí stream near Barcelona with her 8 x 10 camera, Janelle Lynch (born 1969) searches for evidence and omens of nature's life cycles. Her photographs of anthropomorphized trees, walls of litter-strewn vegetation, rocks and disintegrating leaves, all taken during a four-year stay in Barcelona between 2007 and 2011, are informed by three figures whose texts are excerpted in this volume: Roland Barthes, particularly his discussion of mourning in Camera Lucida; Charles Burchfield, whose pantheistic painterly animations of landscape have much inspired Lynch; and Wendell Berry, whose essay on approaching nature with respect and humility helped to further hone her process. Barcelona is also conceived as a homage to Lynch's grandmother, who died in 2008, and to the victims of a devastating flood in the region that occurred in 1962.

Spanning nearly four decades of work by Santa Cruz-based sculptor David Kimball Anderson (born 1946), this monograph presents a chronology of Anderson's works, which balance the industrial and the delicate through such materials as steel, fiberglass and wood.

The authors explore the complicated relationship between art and anthropologyas it has been probed in the work of contemporary artists.

Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing. Plumb traveled to over 70 zoos in the U.S. and Europe to film this behavior, and distilled her footage into a video that weaves together dozens of captive elephants, bearing the weight of an unnatural existence in their small enclosures.