Two Booklets By Shani Mootoo
Produced by DeadCat Press. Very limited editions, available from the author.
Category: Mixed Media
Hybrid Prints
Photogravure intaglio over isolated colour inkjet elements.
Artistamps
Fauxstage using themes from my varied interests. Perforated, some on gummed paper. Includes two examples of photogravure stamps, unique in the artistamp world.
Tabernacle Niches
Three cast paper niches with digital images. Each progressing toward decay and disintegration.
The Agglomeration Imperative (#1)
An intricate installation at the John M. Parrott Art Gallery in Belleville, ON, which reimagines the historical concept of the Wunderkammer.
JAB35 Insert
JAB35, Spring 2014 issue of the Journal of Artists’ Books. This issue’s artists’ book insert was a co-production with Marlene MacCallum and Newfoundland writers, Lisa Moore and Jessica Grant.
The Raven
E. A. Poe’s classic poem as a hand-bound miniature book with an embossed silk cloth cover.
Ephemera
A random collection of letterpress projects, from bookmarks to broadsides. All made using a Challenge–15MA flat-bed proofing press.
BioBooklets
Biographies of the protagonists in the apocryphal history of the Lyric Cranium Collection and Archive.
The Lyric Cranium Catalogue
The Lyric Cranium ceased to exist after August of 2016, when it was dismantled and packed for moving. It lives on in the records I create, such as this small booklet.
The Lyric Cranium
An immersive Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities with objects from my various collections arranged on display.
Bronzes
Small patinated bronze sculptures made using the lost wax casting process.
Rembrandt Defacement
A fine 19th century reproduction Rembrandt intaglio print was scanned to create a facsimile copper photogravure plate. This new intaglio plate could now print an apparent “original”. I gave these reprints to my young grandchildren to colour.
Composites (Digital)
Once digital output was readily available, my experimental image combinations and assemblages became easier to create. These diptychs explore pairings that encourage new ways of seeing.
Thorne Room Suite
Greatly enlarged still life details from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Room Miniatures.
Doll Suite
Photogravures of greatly enlarged plastic and porcelain dolls in varying states of damage and decay.
Alpha & Omega
Alpha & Omega features images drawn from a collection of almost three hundred postmortem portraits, mainly of children, that are part of the Hornan Post Mortem Portrait Archive which once resided at The Lyric Cranium.
Mini Prints
The small sets of prints in this collection explore a wide variety of subjects, content, and processes for entries in international mini-print exhibitions.
Mapping the Bay of Islands
Mapping the Bay of Islands is a four-volume collaborative publishing project with Clifton Meador (NorthWest), Pierre LeBlanc (NorthEast), David Morrish (SouthWest), and Marlene MacCallum (SouthEast).
Les Poubelles de Saint-Pierre
A visual catalogue of the considerable variability of colourful garbage bin designs found throughout Saint-Pierre, the capital of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, just off the south coast of Newfoundland.
Album
A re-interpretation of a Victorian photo album that examines the fading past and the missing dead, with a structure designed to allow the unfolding of initial and final enlargements of key images.
Book Structures
Produced as part of Printed Matters: The Disembodied Book Made Whole Again, an experimental book-structure workshop in Corner Brook, NL with Scott McCarney in 2010.
Cemeteries (Digital)
This section continues with my practice of photographing in cemeteries as I explore them, but this time, using digital media.
Cemeteries (Analogue)
Further to my interests in all things related to thanatos and vanitas in general, exploring and photographing in cemeteries has been part of my practice from the start.
Père Lachaise Heads
Head shots from the sculptures in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris.
Natural History Museums
My photo-diaristic search through international museums and natural history collections in the quest for beauty amidst the macabre.
Single Photographs (Digital)
With the ease of printing colour digitally, more of my work used colour for its inherent verisimilitude and vibrancy. These examples utilize color as the subject as much as the image content itself.
DIED
A pamphlet bound booklet that documents a detail from my visual impressions of a small Ontario cemetery.
CMYK Gravure
Explorations with four-plate CMYK photogravure: a difficult and demanding process.
BlackFlash Suite
A nine page image sequence which deals with mortality, from the Autumn 2008 issue of BlackFlash magazine.
GAZE
Limited edition hand bound bookwork with thirteen copperplate photogravures and letterpress.
The Limestone Barrens Project
Photogravures and 3-D views of the limestone alvars of the Northern Peninsula, Newfoundland, and Co. Clare, Ireland.
Arboreal Pertinacity
Photogravures documenting the struggle of trees surviving difficult environments.
Panoramics (Digital)
The ease of panoramic views exploded once digital technology became available, and my pano-practice became more extreme and experimental as I explored new ways of working with the long frame.
Widelux Panoramics
The Widelux 35mm film camera I used for this work (ca. 1960s) has a unique 140° field of view to produce long, narrow negatives on 35mm film.
The Butterscotch Pudding Pan
A tribute to ma tante, Léonie Guyot, who treated me with puddings from this pan since the 1950s. Now I get to use it.
Locomotive Torpor
Copper-plate photogravures documenting small, desiccated creatures caught in full flight or mid-gesture.
The Gallery
Portraits of Animal Aristocrats. A portrait gallery of compromised taxidermy printed in photogravure.
Bestiarum Excerptum
A Bestiary Fragment – Excerpts from Medieval bestiaries, with letterpress and gold leaf on photogravure portraits of awkward taxidermy.
Alternative Processes
In my search for a photographic image that lives on the surface of the paper, rather than within it like a gelatine-silver print, I've explored multiple photographic processes that include gum prints, cyanotypes, VanDyke prints, and Polaroid transfers.
Single Photogravures
I set out to learn the photogravure process in 1994 with my partner, Marlene. We were told that it would take us seven years to really understand and control this complicated photo/intaglio process.
Altered Prints
Early explorations with toners and stain, scratches and additives on heavily transformed gelatine silver negatives and prints.
Pinhole Photos
A body of work made exclusively with hand-made pinhole cameras of different formats.
Composites (Analogue)
Early black and white print explorations that aim to extend the frame or layer the view. Difficult in a pre-digital age, especially the image-within-an-image on a single support.
Extended Moments
MFA Thesis Exhibition of hand-tinted and toned black and white photographs that deal with the many connections between memory, preservation, decay, and mortality.
INVENTORIES
My first letterpress bookwork. Its production was an inventory of observations, autobiographical details, wood engravings, and technical printing methods.
Crown and Brim
Crown and Brim, by A. N. Wlock, my first letterpress book as printer-publisher.
BFA Work
Black and white medium format work shot over a short period for my final BFA exhibition. The austere and somewhat dark and lonely tone of this collection echoes a period when a family tragedy had recently occurred.
Vignette
This series of domestic views centered around my home and family utilized a 50mm enlarger lens that barely covered the 4×5 film negative.
Random Singles
Early exploratory photographic work from before and during Art School in the 1970s.