Year of the Quiet Sun is a love letter to print making. We, the artists who form Someone Editions, will create a work melding elements of book culture’s past and present to construct an art object that explodes the notions of printing as we know it. Combining the fine and literary arts, this project reaches deep into histoire du livre as printed art objects, and unites 19th-century etchings and print technology with the precision of modern design processes. 
 
Led by Deborah Barnett and Beatriz Hausner, the team of artists at Someone Editions will collaboratively create Year of the Quiet Sun. This folio of prints will RE-create, in an altogether innovative way, a suite of works by Ludwig Zeller, both collages and poetry, juxtaposing the two media –pictorial and textual− indistinguishably, much as he himself has done throughout his astonishing artistic career. His poetry will appear both in the original Spanish and the English translations by A.F. Mortiz, Griffin Poetry Prize winner.
 
The finished object will be an acid-free folio that houses an edition of 18 loose-leaf prints. Each follow will be an art object full of tactility and visual magic, taking printing away from information delivery, thereby reinforcing the endurance importance of material culture. 
 
Ludwig Zeller is a towering figure of international surrealism. Originally from Chile, he is Canadian and lived in Toronto for some 25 years. He now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. An artist of both collage and poetry, he regards all his creative output as a single process. Zeller has dedicated his life to capturing reality at its most essential and transforming it through artistic expression into a renewed totality. 
 
There is a great sympathy between our approaches to artistic creation: Zeller and Someone Editions both work with anachronisity and compositeness. Ludwig takes engravings from the 19th century, rendered through a process no longer used today, cuts them up and juxtaposing the pieces creates collages of radical strangeness and beauty. Year of the Quiet Sun, is a recreation of Zeller’s process: a re-iteration of the pastiche of collage, into an all-new type of work of art, a digitally separated letterpress printed folio. In both instances the beauty and delicacy of the original art – namely, the 19th Century engravings that form the prima materia of Ludwig’s collages– is preserved and enhanced in the re-rendering.

Year of the Quiet Sun folio - Sand
15 x 22.5"
Comprised of cover, back and enclosure flap from textured Strathmore cover, duplexed with acid free lining
2015