Gloomy Monday
Allison Bianco and Lara Henderson, USA
| Gloomy Monday:
Allison Bianco and Lara Henderson, Providence, RI, USA, December
2012 Gloomy Monday was conceived to revisit tragic consequences of evil doing and forecast an ideal future. Named after the infamous Hungarian suicide song, Gloomy Sunday, the book imparts nostalgia for the booksellers' Al-Mutanabbi street while fostering a strange repositioning of memory. Through the familiar symbols, such as city streets, consumer products, and architecture, we can tend to “forget” the past and recall memories that are only partly true. This phenomenon happens naturally with time as well as through changes due to industry, economic systems or, in this case, disaster. The book features billowing clouds among which flurries of text indicate certain destruction. Gloom, doom, boom, and plume are literally layered on top of one another adding a sense of ultimate confusion and disillusionment. This upheaval in the lives of the tiny, unwitting characters creates an eagerness to replace the unpleasant memory with a more palatable one. As the pages unfold, the smoke clears, the sky glows and the street quietly resumes its original state. Gloomy Monday was letterpress and screen printed by Allison Bianco and Lara Henderson at the AS220 Community Printshop in Providence, Rhode Island. Dimensions: 5.5 x 4.5 inches (closed), 5.5 x 34.25 inches (fully stretched open). Medium: letterpress, screen print Allison Bianco is an artist and printmaker from Rhode Island. She earned an MFA in Printmaking (2010) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a BA in Studio Art (2001) from Mount Holyoke College, MA. Bianco has held artist residencies at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (2000) and recently at the Pyramid Atlantic Printshop in Silver Spring, MD (2012). Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been purchased for the collections of Fidelity Investments, RI; Truth Box, Inc., RI; Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, HI; and HonBlue, Inc., HI. allison.eleanor.bianco@gmail.com www.allisonbianco.com Lara Henderson is a book artist based in Providence, RI. Lara attended the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth for her BFA in Graphic Design/ Letterform. In 2010, she completed her MFA at the University of the Arts in Book Arts/ Printmaking, with a focus on book structures and offset lithography. After graduate school, she relocated to Providence, RI where she is currently employed as the AS220 Printshop Manager and continues to teach book arts, both at AS220 and in the Rhode Island area. lahdesign@gmail.com www.larahenderson.com |