Land Marks Press ~ Michigan
(Lynne Avadenka)

Lamentations
By Lynne Avadenka
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 2009. Edition of 8.

13 x 29.25 x 1.25"; 12 unnumbered leaves. Sheet size is 12" high x 28" wide. Created with woodcuts, photopolymer plate printing, and stencils. Letterpress printed with Centaur and Koren types on Yamada Hanga cream paper. Housed in a cloth-covered oblong clamshell box, which has a woodblock inset on its top.

The text, from the biblical book of Lamentations, is printed in Hebrew and English. The English translation is from the Jewish Publication Society. Each text page (5 in Hebrew, 5 in English) is accompanied by a color woodcut. The custom-made box includes an inset carved piece of wood from which prints were made.

Colophon: "Echoes, reverberations, multiplicities, repeats: the long narrow sheet - a scroll unrolled - like the original Book of Lamentations; prints from wood, the same material from which houses are built, with traces of home cut out: doors, windows, openings; orbits linked and overlapped, inked and overprinted, suggesting absence, presence, and interconnected lives."

Lynne Avadenka, essay: "The language of the lament envelops us with no less immediacy, and the keening that began in 586 BCE is clearly audible 2500 years later. The Book of Lamentations is powerfully graphic in its recounting of disaster and despair, a chronicle of losses after the siege and sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Five short chapters capture in astonishing vividness the complete obliteration of an entire city and the subsequent exile of all its former inhabitants. As the voice of the narrator shifts from mother to man to nation, an abecedarium of atrocities and zealous decimation is laid bare. For most of the Book of Lamentations, the format is an alphabetic acrostic, perhaps meant to highlight the skill of the author, perhaps meant as an aid to those who memorized the text, or perhaps meant to illustrate the inexhaustible list of damages suffered by the people. It is thought, because of the intensity of the descriptions in the Book of Lamentations, that it was written shortly after the destruction occurred, and some believe the author was the prophet Jeremiah. Authorship is not nearly as important as the text itself, sober and clear-eyed in its documentation of the unspeakable. The Book of Lamentations is recited each year in late summer, in accordance with its Hebrew date, the 9th of Av. In fact, it is not read, but sung, in a particular minor tune, echoing and evoking the tragedy of the text. We sit on the floor as the text is sung; we mourn destruction, and mourners sit low. In Lamentations, we hear the voices of the powerless, the ones overwhelmed and overrun by those in control. What perplexes the people is that they are given no reason for this calamity. They wonder: what was our sin, what did we do wrong, why do we deserve this? And the text offers no answers to these difficult questions. Lamentations is at once specific, and, unfortunately, universal. A story from antiquity and of modern times. A city, once full of people, is destroyed and emptied, putting into motion a cycle of exile, displacement and disruption. If home is not a physical place, it is family. If a family is destroyed, where is home? And who will gather all the exiles, who will remember them, renew them, take them back, as in days of old, as before?"
$4,500 (Last four copies)

Dan Pagis: Six Poems
Translated from Hebrew to English by Stephen Mitchell
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 2007.Edition of 15.

7.75 x 11.5 x 1"; 8 tri-fold sheets. Lithographs printed on waran-shi paper and then hand colored with gouache. Types: Centaur, David, and Optima. Printed letterpress from photopolymer plates on Magnani grey paper. Laid into letter-fold cloth-covered portfolio. Text in English and Hebrew.

Colophon: "In the fall of 2006, Lynne Avadenka was an artist in residence at the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. While there, she created a series of collages, from maps included in a 1910 Baedeker guide to southern Germany. These collages are composed of train lines, symbols of modern efficiency and wartime inevitability."

Gabriel Sanders, The Jewish Daily Forward, December 4, 2007: "In the fall of 2006, Michigan-based artist Lynne Avadenka went to the Bavarian town of Schwandorf for a six-week artists’ residency program. Never having been to Germany, she picked up a couple of books she thought might be useful in helping her prepare: a Baedeker guide to southern Germany, some secondhand German-English dictionaries, and a Hebrew German grammar she had found on a discard table at her local Jewish library. Little did she know how centrally the books would come to figure in the work she was about to undertake.

"Once in Germany, as she struggled to come to terms with the country’s history, language, and terrain, Avadenka found herself taking apart the books she’d brought and using the pages as the raw material for three distinct series of prints. Taken together, she later wrote, the body of work formed a rumination on 'memory and mapping, preservation, destruction and reconstruction....'

"Alongside these figures, Avadenka placed bilingual versions of the work of Israeli poet and concentration camp survivor Dan Pagis (1930-1986). 'The stark, allusive forms seemed a good counterpoint to Pagis’s stark and allusive poetry,' said Avadenka."

Introduction: "The remarkable life of Dan Pagis began in Radatzch, Bukovina in 1930; he died in Jerusalem in 1986. During World War II, when he was in his early teens, Pagis was imprisoned in a concentration camp in the Ukraine. He escaped in 1944, and two years later made his way to a kibbutz in pre-state Israel, where he later became a teacher. Pagis received a PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and taught medieval Hebrew literature there, becoming an expert in the field. Through his powerfully lean and direct poetry, Dan Pagis is one of the writers and visionaries who shaped the modern, living Hebrew language."
$2500 (Two numbered copies remaining in the edition)

Click individual image to enlarge
Pagis review in Parenthesis by Nancy Campbell

By a Thread
By Lynne Avadenka
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 2006. Edition of 300.

8 x 8" page size. 8 x 2.75" tab page. Double sided accordion, 11 panels. Laid in a letter-fold paper wrapper. Printed offset in full color and die-cut on 80# dulcet cover. Legend and Centaur types used on the text pages. Image pages created from original drawings that combine gouache, powdered graphite and letterpress printing. Produced at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts, at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Land Marks Press: "Imagine a conversation between two extraordinary women, separated by a thousand years, yet connected by acts of bravery and more than coincidental commonalities. Imagine that this dialogue transcends time, and links Queen Esther, from the Jewish story of Purim, and Scheherazade, the Muslim woman who told stories for a thousand an one nights. This is the inspiration for Lynne Avadenka's new artist's book.

"The book structure reinforces the never-ending, always mutable nature of storytelling, and the narrative is printed on tabbed pages that weave their way through the evocative imagery printed on the accompanying page spreads."
$350

An Only Kid
By Lynne Avadenka
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 1990. Edition of 75.

6.2 x 9.4" 13 pages. Printed on Frankfurt cream paper. A single signature hand-sewn pamphlet in brown wrappers made of cotton rags, goat hair, and pigment. Title printed in blue, red and gray. Uses a cut-away stair-step margin printed for page tabs. Avandenka says the text and art were inspired by the books of El Lissitzky.

From the Library of Congress collection: "An artist, a printmaker, and a calligrapher, Lynne Avadenka created this version of “Had Gadya,” the last and one of the most beloved songs in the Haggadah, the book read on the holiday of Passover in the context of family gatherings and festive meals. “Had gadya” (“an only kid”) are the first two words of the song. Allegorically, the song describes successive nations that seek, one after another, to devour and destroy the Jewish people. Finally, God ends the escalating violent cycle, bringing peace. Avadenka suggests in her commentary that “Had Gadya” might also be a song of personal redemption, where one rises beyond fear and doubt to create a life for oneself, guided by deeds of lovingkindness."
$200

Root Words:
An Alphabetic Exploration
By Lynne Avadenka in collaboration with Mohamed Zakariya
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 2001. Edition of 30.

9.75 x 12”; extends to 77”. Letterpress on Gampi Torinoko and Hanga-shi papers. The selected words were hand lettered then transferred to photopolymer plates. Image pages were hand drawn then printed using a combination of letterpress (polymer plates) and lithography. Text pages are Trajan and Garamond from polymer plates. Image and text pages are printed then mounted on boards that form two-sided, continuous concertina binding. Spreads containing the Arabic and Hebrew words are two-layer folios pamphlet stitched into the concertina. These pages are backed by brief, relevant quotes from many sources. Housed in portfolio box covered in pale blue silk cloth with inset cover image. Inner box is lined in pale blue paper with title and colophon pages mounted inside.

A timely, sensitive and considered exploration of the Arabic and Hebrew languages through seven words whose meanings are the same and whose pronunciations are very close in both tongues. The introductory text asserts: "Because they share ancient origins, these languages echo one another. Possessing similar sounds, familiar shapes, overlapping and borrowed meanings, both languages are simultaneously ancient and modern. So much alike, yet over centuries, their common origins have been overshadowed by painful divisions."

The words for language, human being, trust, student, book, wisdom and sky are calligraphically rendered by the artists and framed by Avadenka's images, which were inspired by the combined beauty of Hebrew and Arabic letterforms. The seven words are also flanked by collaboratively written, eloquent and informative texts that traces the development of the two languages from their shared beginnings to their modern forms. Zakariya was responsible for the Islamic calligraphy and source material for the history of the Arabic languages. The Arabic words are lettered in the New Kufic style. Avadenka's research focused on the history of the Hebrew Alphabet and Hebrew calligraphy. The Hebrew is lettered in a style inspired by Sofer Stam and used in writing sacred documents.

An elegant, thoughtfully composed contemplation.
$2,750 (Four copies remaining)

Grandpa Isidore
Translated by Nicholas de Lange
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 1999. Edition of 50.

8.75 x 12” Handsomely printed from polymer plates in Garamond and David types on Frankfurt paper. A full-spread etching, printed in black, green and gold, suggests two windows, two vantage points, and is the centerpiece for the mirrored texts. Handsewn. Twinrocker Sagebrush cover. Signed.

Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Etching by Lynne Avadenka. Text, title, and colophon are printed from front to back in English and back to front in Hebrew. In this short reverie, we enter an old man's remembrance of war. Awakened from a dream, his past and present converge as the thunder outside becomes gunfire, and he thinks he is again the representative of the Jewish community he once was. But, fully awake in rainy Jerusalem, as "the nations rage" on, old confrontations continue inside the man.

Not a story of senility, but a glimpse into how past and present can exist simultaneously, how external battles finished, the soul still wrestles injustice. Beautifully rendered.
$300

Click image for more

The Uncommon Perspective of M. E. J. Colter
By Lynne Avadenka.
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 1993. Edition of 100.

The contents of the book are housed in paper specially made for this edition by Kathryn Clark and designed by Lynne Avadenka during a working weekend at Twinrocker. The paper contains earth from the New Mexican desert, cotton rag, and beaten straw. Protected by a paper case.

A biography of Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, an exceptional woman and a turn-of-the-century architect who designed and built structures throughout the southwestern United States. The largest number of her buildings still standing are found at the Grand Canyon. They represent a visual documentation of her vision, aesthetic concern, and design philosophy. The accordion fold book has three chapters pamphlet-sewn into the folds and is shaped like a Southwestern adobe house. And it feels like adobe!.
$300