Vancouver Art Book Fair
October 04, 2024
From July 26-27, the (VABF) returned after a five-year absence to the Vancouver art and book arts community. With 67 exhibitors — including artists, book and magazine publishers, and galleries — the fair took place at the centrally-located Vancouver Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre near Yaletown.
VABF, like , is dedicated to showcasing art-related publications and aims to promote and empower artists as publishers, from ‘zines and chapbooks, to broadsides, books, and print-related ephemera.
As a first-time exhibitor to the world of art book fairs, I was delighted to be sandwiched between Vancouver artist and renowned artist-run centre . As an whose work combines library and archival research with interests in artist books and multiples, book arts, experimental prose, poetry, visual poetry, performance, and the visual arts, I presented a variety of works that featured text art, conceptual poetry, and visual systems of information. This included a chapbook called Data Poetics, which uses discarded library punch cards to formulate new compositions of data; selected broadsides and chapbooks from Bride Machine, an artists’ book published by ; older chapbooks from my noise + silence series, inspired by Boolean operators and categories of information theory; Shelf Life, a series of photographic compositions inspired by the titles and bound spines of monographs in academic libraries; and a new series of postcards featuring erasure poetry and discarded library catalogue cards.
On Sunday July 28, the VABF played host to a one-day symposium dedicated to art publications at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, which featured three distinct panels devoted to learning from collections; magazines, criticism, and art writing; and another on distribution, collaboration and funding. The panels and conversations featured artists, writers, and editors from across Canada and the US, and the discussion was lively and informal, with lots of questions from the audience about how artists’ books and writing about art is a vital component of our contemporary culture.
As both a participant in the fair and panel presenter, the VABF proved that book arts is alive and well in Vancouver, and I look forward to attending the 2025 edition.