Aaron Flint Jamison

Aaron Flint Jamison is an editor-artist or an artist-editor. An artist who is engaged with multiple artistic projects and some projects linked with the community. Besides being the founder and the editor of the magazine Veneer, he is the co-initiator of a first art centre, Department of Safety in Anacortes, Washington (2002-2010), and of a new art centre for the city of Portland: YU. This structure consists of an exhibition venue, a library, a printing studio, a publishing house and the archives of The Portland Center of Visual Art (1972-1987). It is therefore a production and exhibition space and a testimony to the dynamism of the contemporary art scene in Portland in the 1970s-1980s. Jamison’s work comes as a wide range of reflections on the object: an assemblage, a piece of furniture, a poster or a publication which all push the link between representation, production, functionality, presentation and distribution to the edges of its simplicity, its obviousness and its impact. Each object merges technical and aesthetic potential and conceptual accuracy. Aaron Flint Jamison is between the artist and the technician, between the craftsman and the inventor. For his magazine Veneer as well as for other publications, production and distribution are organised in a traditional manner, distributed slowly, close to manual know-how. Sent by post, handed out in the neighbourhood, free from material or electronic constraints, these publications’ spread is infinitesimal and rhizomatic. Veneer started in 2007, is published two times a years and will not go past 18 issues. Today, the series is at its 8th issue. Each number is printed in 300 copies, never more. Once completed, this series will be arranged in a miniature bookcase designed and made by Jamison. Each new issue of Veneer is special in its form – typography, printing, pagination, cutting, cover, binding – which is inspired by the content: essays by artists, scientists, translations, re-editions of interviews, statistics… In the meantime, each magazine remains coherent with the series itself (format). Some issues are hand-made with the help of friends or colleagues and we have here a rich collection of editorial ideas, technical and playful, that explore the transformations of the book itself. Pages glued together or impregnated, torn covers, inserts of little notebooks or postcards. From one number to the next, this publication is alive and in motion remaining a source for new editorial ideas.

For the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Aaron Flint Jamison has made an artist’s publication, combining leaflets of different papers, unexpected and precious: marbled paper, carbon paper, rag paper. The keyword and underlying theme of this publication, The Stutter proves to be a perfect illustration of this movement of break, repetition and multiplication present in this new publication, from page to page and image to image, reproduced 250 times. The stutter expresses with lightness and humour the very nature of the edition. The final title of this publication is nevertheless BLOCK 2. It is printed in offset, typography and colours, texts and images. The printing as the binding brings together the hand-made and the manufactured. The set altogether makes 112 pages, 7 quires, the format is approx.11 x 20 cm and it is an edition of 250, of which 50 artist’s proofs. Aaron Flint Jamison has an extremely precise and refined conception of edition: his publications and their content play a metaphorical game with texts and images illustrating the editorial act and production itself. From the body of a produced object to the modes of exchange, from the hand-made to high technology, all parameters are used as genuine aesthetic, poetic and conceptual material. For his exhibition at the CEC, Jamison will also build a special display: a “fountain” of editions that will create a most comfortable place for the presentation of BLOCK 2, the new edition made exclusively for the CEC.

Aaron Flint Jamison, whose work has been presented at the CEC in the group show T. Quelques possibilités de texte, was born in 1979 in Billings, Massachusetts. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He has recently exhibited at Castillo/Corrales, Paris, at Artspeak, Vancouver and at the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin. He is the founder of the magazine Veneer and the co-founder of the center for contemporary art YU (Portland, Oregon).

Aaron Flint Jamison