Primitive Press ~ Arkansas
(Michael Peven)

Slugs and Roses
An Essay on Beauty and Survival
By Michael Peven
Fayetteville, Arkansas: Primitive Press, 2008. Second Edition, 11 copies.

4 x 4.8" closed; 132" extended; 46 pages. Double-sided accordion. Ink jet printed. Laid in lightweight letter-fold case with title scripted in silver on spine, all housed in lightweight black paper slipcase. Images downloaded into Photoshop for slight manipulation and then imported into Freehand for sequencing, text, and layout. Printed using an Epson 4000 printer and Ultrachrome inks. Original edition of Slugs and Roses printed in 2000.

One side of this concertina fold book features images of slugs and roses with text overlay. Images of roses have text regarding slugs and slug images have information regarding roses. On the reverse side of the concertina the rose and slug images continue but the text discusses beauty and survival.

Judith Hoffberg (umbrella Volume 24, No. 2, August, 2001): "... a beautifully boxed full-color bookwork in a concertina printed on both sides, generated from original digital images made with a Sony Mavica camera. These are pictures of actual slugs and roses that grow in the artist’s backyard. The texts deal with survival and growth. On one side are the desperate needs of all of us to for ecological emergencies, and on the opposite pages are the stories of Easter Island and its invasion by humans and its degradation. On the back are facts and figures about slugs, a true biological lesson, as well as a description of roses and their history. The text as usual in all the artist’s books often times seems obscured - you really have to work hard to save the earth! "

Michael Peven: "The book expands to 11' when opened and slugs can stretch to 11 times their body length."
$150

Open...Heart Surgery
By Michael Peven
2006. Edition of 49.

7.254 x 8.5",14 pages. Handmade, paperback with stiff board, inkjet prints on enhanced matte paper with waxed linen thread, craft wire, staples, and PVA. Pages open in a variety of ways. Some are held together with steri strips and staples. Bound on left and right sides, pages open in the middle by a series of increasingly more difficult manipulations.

Michael Peven: “Open…Heart Surgery details my heart surgery in 2002. It's kind of a ‘primer.’ With pages that open in a variety of ways it reveals my chest going from healthy and hairy progressively to more injured with an obvious scar against little hair to being held together with steri-strips and staples against a naked chest. Then through an x-ray and angiogram into the heart itself and beyond."
$250
$750 Deluxe version, leather bound

Drive by Shootings
By Michael Peven
Fayetteville, Arkansas: Primitive Press, 2004. Open Edition.

4 x 5.5" closed, 60" extended; 15 images. Accordion fold vertical structure in postcard souvenir album format. Images on one side only. Wrap fold with tuck in closure. Ink jet printed.

Art rather than violence: the drive by in this case is that of a traveler in a car; the shootings are photographic shots. The postcard-type pages (image only, the reverse is blank) show roadside attractions and sights in the (mostly) Western US — the Crazy Horse Monument in Custer, South Dakota; the Jimenez Sculpture in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All photographs taken during Peven’s travels from 2001-2003.
$10

Manmade Wonders
By Michael Peven.
1979. Edition of 250.

Set of six books, 11.5 x 15.5 cm. each. Matchbook construction. Paper wrapper, staple bound. Offset printed in color. Signed but unnumbered.

A set of six oversize styled matchbooks feature well known US landmarks and monuments on the front flip cover. Peven also calls this set "Snatches." This sexual wordplay hints at the subtext, here laid out not beneath the surface but under the (matchbook) covers, that suggests a less than Puritan take of some of US's more famous and revered erections.
$100