Highlights from the Boston Art Book Fair

Earlier this month we participated in the 2022 Boston Art Book Fair put on by the Boston Center for the Arts. It was an exciting opportunity to explore the galleries, artists, collectives, and creatives in our city. Check out some of our favorite booths we saw:

Boston Art Review

The Boston Art Review brought an assortment of issues to purchase. It was wonderful to see AOG artist Pelle Cass’ work featured at another booth at the Book Fair. Cass’ photograph is featured on the cover of Issue 03: Tracing Movement.

bostonartreview.com
Instagram: @bostonartreview

View of the booth for the Boston Art Review in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Praise Shadows Art Gallery

Praise Shadows had a mix of books, posters, and other art objects to check out. We were excited to see one of our new favorite books, Designing Motherhood, out on the booth’s spread. It was a great opportunity of visitors to get a taste for what this growing gallery has to share with the Boston art community.

praiseshadows.com
Instagram: @praiseshadowsart

View of the booth for Praise Shadows Art Gallery in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

The ICA Boston had a selection of prints, books, and merchandise to choose from. We loved checking out the current exhibition book, To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood. The work of Barbara Kruger and Dr. Woo were showcased on apparel, as well as prints of Jordan Nassar’s work that is currently on view in the exhibition Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth.

icaboston.org
Instagram: @icaboston

View of the booth for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Adri Tan

It was great getting to chat with Tan about their process and learn more about their work. Tan uses portrait photography to explore identity and authority of self. Digital textile patterns are created by restating the body into repeating patterns in the zine, I Objectify Myself to Subvert Your Gaze. The textile becomes an object, allowing for the portraits of the artist’s East Asian models to reject the stereotypes and to yield autonomy of themselves. In another zine, Fashioning a Sense of Self, Tan's photographs reclaims and explores the identities of women and non-binary people of color by allowing the models to wear what they felt most themselves in. We can’t wait to see what else they will be working on next!

adriannatanphotography.com
Instagram: @atangerinee

View of Adri Tan’s booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Paige Mehrer at Plum Press

We are delighted by the work of Paige Mehrer of Plum Press. Her whimsical images are enchanting and there mystical blues and purples of her palette drew us in!

paigemehrer.com
Instagram: @paigemehrer

View of Paige Mehrer’s section of the Plum Press booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Kareem Worrell

We got to have an engaging conversation with photographer Kareem Worrell about his photograph and practice. At his booth he presented the zine, Passenger, which features Polaroids from the passenger seat of a pivotal road trip he took at the beginning of his career. He told me that he had lost the photographs from the trip for over 15 years, but thought of them often. This body of work inspired a new series call Lonely Highway that documents views from the passensger seat once again. His book, Mile Marker, is a part of the ongoing he was selling at the fair. The book showcases seventeen years worth of images that capture the ever-changing landscapes and unique atmosphere that only occurs on the open road.

kareemworrell.com
Instagram: @kareemworrellphoto

View of Kareem Worrell’s booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

We were thrilled to exhibit three of our represented artists: Pelle Cass, Cassandra Jones, and Kristina McComb, alongside these talented creatives in Boston. It was a great opportunity for us to connect with our Boston community in a way we had not done before, and the whole team felt excited and energized by the fair - we are so grateful for all of the amazing visitors we had. Through a collection of prints, books, and small sculptural work, we showcased new and returning work by each artist: prints by all three artists gained excitement while Cass’ and McComb’s newly released books were a hit. The remaining inventory is still available for purchase on the buy now page for the fair.

Gallery intern Lauren Hill and Assistant Director Kaylee Hennessey at the booth

Announcement: Boston Art Book Fair

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is pleased to announce our first year of participation in the Boston Art Book Fair. The event is located in the historic Cyclorama of Boston’s South End neighborhood. The fair will showcase local Boston artists, creators, and businesses to connect Boston with the national art community, and facilitate connections between Boston creatives and prospective publishing partners.

Dates: November 4-6, 2022
Friday Eve Ticketed* Preview Party (preview offerings, dance party, film screening, food & drinks): 6pm-9pm
*Tickets are $30 and can be purchased here.
Saturday: 12pm-7pm: Free and open to the public
Sunday: 12pm-5pm: Free and open to the public
More details: https://bostonartbookfair.com/

Pelle Cass, “Thalia Beach Friday No. 2,” 2019, Ink print on heavy matte, 13 x 19 in. (Ed. of 15) 24 x 36 in. (Ed. of 10) 40 x 60 in. (Ed. of 3)

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is pleased to present three of our represented artists at the Boston Art Book Fair: Pelle Cass (Brookline, MA), Cassandra Jones (Ojai, CA), and Kristina McComb (Gill, MA). We look forward to sharing an array of books, prints, and art objects by each artists. These artists share a special interest in the message produced by the relationships in their images. Along with this common curiosity, Cass, McComb and Jones each bring new life to their medium by combining traditional photography with a contemporary lens.

Pelle Cass constructs his compositions using a large collection of photographs taken from the same angle. He does not manipulate the original photography other than deciding which objects to omit and keep, and each component of the photograph remains in its same location in the overall composition. These choices produce an image conveying a sense of chaos and the passing of time. At the Boston Book Art Fair, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery will be presenting his new book “Pelle Cass” alongside prints from his series, Crowded Fields.

Cassandra Jones, “Lemon Ball,” 2019, Archival Ink Jet on 100% Cellulose, 24 x 20 in

Kristina McComb, “Boston Atheneum 2040,” 2021, Photograph - framed, 9 x 6 in, 36 x 24 in, 42 x 28 in

Cassandra Jones takes a different approach to the idea of repetition by collecting and collaging mostly found photographs into a work that comments directly on contemporary society. Their digital photography tells stories of a prismatic reflection of our self-involved, technology-based, snap-happy contemporary lifestyle. Their work will be available as prints at the Boston Art Book Fair.

Kristina McComb’s work explores the passing of time, similar to Pelle Cass’s images, as well as the relationships created from light, line, and texture. Differing from the work of Jones and Cass, McComb does not alter the objects in her images, simply capturing the existing in a striking composition. Her practice focuses on the intersection of photography and sculpture. At the show, we will be exhibiting her photographs from her ongoing series featuring the Boston Athenæum in addition to her most recent publication “An Archive of Time: A Life Lived in the Boston Athenæum” .

For more information about the Boston Art Book Fair, please click here.

Press Release: Crowded Fields

Solo exhibition featuring Pelle Cass
February 11 – March 21, 2021

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Crowded Fields, a solo exhibition of photographs by Boston-based artist Pelle Cass. This exhibition features work from two recent series in which the artist combines thousands of images to form one dynamic composition of a sporting event. Working in opposition to traditional sports photography, Pelle Cass aims to capture not the emotion of a moment, but the chaos and physicality of the entire game, evoking a Baroque-like sense of movement and angle in his compositions.

MIT v Williams Pole Vault, 2019. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper

Armed with a digital camera and Photoshop skills, Cass sets out to create compositions that redefine our notion of what “street photography” can encompass. Though we see many of these defining elements in Cass’s work - the unscripted, unposed, authentic moments in time - Cass aims to break away from the practice that traditionally catches the subject unaware or photographed without permission. Rather than chasing to capture a singular moment, his work operates as an overwhelming, singular time lapse of an event. In a single glance, a pass is made and caught, a diver exits and enters the water. Teammates interact with each other (or even their own selves) in a way that does not follow the constraints of time, existing on a singular, chaotic plane. Drawing on art historical influences, Pelle Cass writes: “I think, sometimes, of Pollock’s swarms of paint and the coiled musculature of Michelangelo’s figures. I think of floating and flying in space--literal as a high diver and as elusive as the dizzying, disorienting abstract compositions of a Modernist like Malevich.”

Futures Tennis in Brighton, 2018. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper

Pelle Cass’s complementary body of work, Uncrowded Fields, works to evoke these same feelings in the viewer, all the while leaving out one of the most important components of the Crowded Fields series: the human subjects. Uncrowded Fields shows tennis balls flying without direction, evidence of the human presence and movement without actually including the human figure. The viewer can’t help but to draw a connection to the world of the pandemic. For so long, we saw an absence of human life, interactions modified for safety, and even the postponing of sporting events. When placed in conversation with a photograph from Cass’s Crowded Fields series, these balls behave as players that aren’t human, but through motion and composition hint towards the human presence.

Pelle Cass (1954) is a photographer from Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s exhibited at the George Eastman House, the Albright Knox Gallery, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Metamorf Biennial for Art and Technology in Norway and has presented shows at Stux Gallery (Boston), Gallery Kayafas (Boston), and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is owned by the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the MFA, Houston. Cass’s photos have appeared in books such as Photoviz (Gestalten), Deleueze and the City (Edinburgh University Press), Langford’s Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeney’s, FOAM, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, and many others. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.

This project has been supported by a grant from the Artist's Resource Trust.