May 16, 2007

TALE OF THE 'DONKEY MAN' POPS OUT OF BOISE STATE BOOK ARTS CLASS' WORKS WITH HELP OF 3-D GLASSES

Boise State University professor Tom Trusky is inviting the public to learn a little bit more about Pacific Northwest history and enjoy the works created by his book arts class - all in 3-D.

Visitors to Trusky's Web site (english.boisestate.edu/ttrusky/index.htm) will be able to see the class' project with the help of 3-D glasses, which can be obtained by calling (208) 426-4210 or by e-mailing Trusky. The students were asked to create a book that dealt with the story of the "Donkey Man," J. Fred Anderson, a photographer who worked in northern Idaho and eastern Washington at the turn of the 20th century.

Anderson found a suffering, abandoned donkey in Lewiston and nursed it back to health, later enlisting the donkey to carry his chemicals and other photography equipment. Anderson would travel from town to town, often taking photos taking photos of children riding the donkey and wearing costumes, as well as portraits of American Indians in the region. He married a young woman that his family later referred to as "The Child Bride," according to Anderson's son, Howard. The Child Bride ran off, and Anderson eventually married again and fathered Howard Anderson and a daughter. After being mistreated by his father, 17-year-old Howard ran away from his parents and Idaho, never to return.

The book arts class was tasked with using some part of the story in a creative way. Some of the creations deal with Anderson's camera, or are told from the point of view of The Child Bride.

3-D enthusiasts have another opportunity to use their special glasses by visiting the Idaho Center for the Book's Web site at http://www.lili.org/icb/. Trusky worked with Kathy Robinson at Boise State Printing and Graphics Services to turn his photos into 3-D creations.

"I only regret that the glasses are red and blue instead of blue and orange," he said.

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Contact: Tom Trusky, English, (208) 426-1999, ttrusky@boisestate.edu
Media Contact: Julie Hahn, University Communications, (208) 426-5540, juliehahn@boisestate.edu

ANDERSON'S GRIMOIRE A Forgotten History of Idaho

Kate H. Baker
6 x 5 1/2" (irregular; spine "wand" 12")
"Corset-stitch" sewn
Numerous artifacts (photographs, feathers, broken spectacles, lavender, a key, a nail...)
24 pp.

From information about J. Frederick Anderson Kate Baker has created a "Grimoire," a witty, twisted homage to fairytales by not only imagined-distant-relative Hans Christian Anderson but also those German brothers Grimm. Baker was told this tale, she tells us, by Howard Anderson, son of J. Frederick Anderson. She cleverly includes faux facts, artifacts and photographs with real Anderson facts and photos in a bursting, suede paper-covered book held almost-closed by a band of beaded jute. In Baker's biblio witches brew, Anderson senior is a malevolent magician given to fits of pique. In one of them, he turns Howard's mother into a pooch. Proof's not in the pudding, but in the photo Baker inserts at this point in the narrative she's typed (on an antique machine known as electric typewriter): we see JFA's Victorian-style photograph of son Howard, his drowsy, unsuspecting Little Lord Fauntleroy head resting on the family dog. But Baker's told us who that woof once was....

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I REMEMBER

Brooke Burton
7 3/8 x 10 5/8" (in a flocked, cloth-covered portfolio bound with a 13-foot-long cord)
Drawn, painted, then laser color-copied; embossed
Saddle stitched and glued
12 pp.

Once we have unraveled a long, sensuous, red, silky cord, we may open the opulent and yet ominous black and bronzy cloth-covered portfolio that holds I remember. A picture frame forms the cover of Burton's conceptual work, and textblock pages have been cut to create a series of frames encapsulating one picture of a man standing beside a donkey. As we page through the book, this image grows successively smaller as the frame border becomes wider and wider. Burton also moves the focus of each frame, slowly shifting our view from the man ("Dad") standing beside his donkey to the donkey. As we lift frame after frame, each one becomes darker than the preceding frame. We suddenly realize the male or female narrator's written description of his or her father as being "kind' and "patient" is meant to apply to the donkey-that the narrator's father may be the antonym of the caption descriptions. With the exception of a postage stamp-size image of the donkey's head, the last page is totally black. Embossing -not fountain pen ink-on the black surface of this final page creates the final caption: "I remember him."

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TERGIVERSATE

Sarah Lenz
6 1/2 X 4 1/2"
Photographs, written and typewritten texts
7-fold, 3-panelled Flag Book format

"To abandon or run away from," "to turn renegade" are definitions of the title of Lenz' black, cloth-covered book. The first definition describes the course taken by J. F. Anderson's first wife, a woman we know only as "Child Bride." The latter definition might well describe Anderson's son Howard, by a second wife. Lenz, as Child Bride, writes a "Dear John" letter to her husband, a letter reproduced in the top series of flag book recto panels. The bottom series of recto panels contains typewritten text wherein Lenz-as-Howard Anderson explains why he ran away from home, never to return to his parents-or to Idaho. The mid-section recto panels contain a photograph of Anderson's donkey and wagon. The dramatic flutter of flags created when Lenz' book is opened make the donkey and wagon almost kinetic entities. The backside of all flag panels have sections of photographs, some screened. The front pastedown is a photograph of a boy and a woman beside and on the porch of a house, while these figures have vanished in the back cover pastedown photo. Form and content fuse and further define Lenz' book title.

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THE GRASSHOPPER WAS BLACK

Wayne Ross
8 x 7 3/8"
Photographs present in calendar-style format
7 spreads (1 with handwritten text, 6 with photographs and lines of poetry)

A Nick Adams hunting story by Ernest Hemingway provides the title for Ross' volume which opens with another quote from Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises): "...and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time...." This quote is followed by lines from Conrad's The Heart of Darkness which underscore the ability of the human mind to contain all of the past and all of the future. These extracts set the stage for the heart of Ross' book which pairs J. F. Anderson hunting photographs taken circa 1910 and photographs taken a few years ago by Ross on hunting trips he took. Covers and textblock pages are on manila file folders sewn with black cord in a butterfly stitch. Spread pairings reveal often seemingly identical scenes (wilderness vistas, campfire cookery, tenting scenes, big game trophies). Lines from a short poem by Ross paradoxically separate and yet join the photos, for they philosophize about the nature of ritual and repetition.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

Kim Sherman-Labrum
7 1/4 x 11" faux/facsimile photograph album
1 enclosed letter

Three Anderson photograph albums are known to survive. Labrum has taken a vintage, as-new, empty album and roughed it up a bit, using bleach, sandpaper, blue and green watercolors, adhesive tapes and steam, aging it so that, to all appearances, it is a fourth Anderson album. She has filled her album with many Anderson photos and, with her Photoshopping hand, has turned all of them to sepia. A number have been lovingly mistreated, images scratched, blotched, spotted. Labrum has also cunningly altered selected photos; as well, she has salted her sepia mine with bogus Anderson photos. (Abraham Lincoln is unobtrusively tucked away in one N. Idaho wheat field!) Anderson is the reason why. For reasons we do not know, the North Idaho photographer altered a few of his own photos. (Dropping, for instance, a Native American in full regalia on what was, in fact, an empty, Idaho dirt road.) A forged letter from a purported friend of the author's uncle-if uncle she has-accompanies the album, explaining how the work was obtained and why she has sent it to Labrum. Photographic and textual fact and/or fiction blur, suggesting seeing should not always be believing.

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BEHIND ANDERSON'S CAMERA

Earle D. Swope
8 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 3 1/4" facsimile Premo Poco camera
Rear "viewfinder holder" contains loose photos

Swope has created a bookwork sized to the exact dimensions of J. F. Anderson's camera using stained Baltic birch plywood, black self-adhesive camera leather, black book cloth and brass hinges. Pulling open the camera's front panel, the reader/photographer may unfold and position joined panels to form a cube on whose exteriors are frontal, overhead and left and right side, life-size, color photographs of the camera, bellows extended, ready for use. Unfolding and flattening this cube reveals the interiors of five panels that form a large "T." These panels contain explanatory material, top, l-r: biography of Anderson (1), technical camera information (2) and information about Anderson's photographs (3). Two panels creating the stem of the "T" are hinged to and below panel 2: reproduction of a Premo Poco advertisement (4) and a colophon (5). The back of the camera opens to a small chamber originally used to sight and focus an image and to insert an unexposed negative; Swope's chamber houses 15 Anderson prints in this space.