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This catalogue contains full-page reproductions of the entire body of work presented in Gest's 2006 Renaissance Society exhibition. In this series, Gest captured his lone sitters at the chance interstices of deep reflection, when the self dwells in thought. The construction of the self as it happens before Gest's camera serves to question the construction of that self in reality. Gest uses digital photography to monumentalize photography's ability to capture such fleeting moments. Each photograph is seamlessly constructed from hundreds of digital images of the sitter and their surroundings. The photographs' initial straightforward appearance can only be maintained at a cursory glance. Gest's subtle and not so subtle exaggerations of proportion and perspective quickly betray the images as mannerist constructions. This makes Gest's work susceptible to the discourse of post-photography, which is dominated by the means rather than the ends of photography. Gest however is adamant that the means he employs should in no way be mistaken for their meaning, stating, "That the image is made and manipulated digitally is neither here nor there. Digital photography simply allows me to make the picture I want." In her essay, Catherine Sousloff, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzes Gest's work in relation to historical protraiture and the visual construction of modern subjectivities. The catalogue also includes the transcript of an interview between Ben Gest and Hamza Walker.

Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Sullivan creates radically hybrid works that combine performance, installation art, dance, traditional theatre and Hollywood cinema. Five Economies (big hunt), a five screen video installation, mixed and matched scenes and acting styles taken from The Miracle Worker, Marat/Sade, Persona, Tim and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, as well as real life instances of virtuoso acting such as the story of Birdie Jo Hoaks, a 25 year old female who passed as a 12 year old boy in order to gain state social services. In black and white, and completely soundless, big hunt forces its audience to read drama and plot on the basis of the semiotics of gesture and mise-en-scene. This catalogue is illustrated by numerous video stills from Five Economies, and photographs of Gold Standard, the high-energy performance directed by Sullivan that took place at The Renaissance Society exhibition opening, which featured 6 pairs of actors all simultaneously acting the learning-to-eat-with-a-spoon scene between Helen and Annie from The Miracle Worker. Hamza Walker's essay discusses Five Economies' relationship to Modernist formalism and essentialism regarding media; Russell Ferguson and Sullivan talk about her working methods and the theories of acting and theatre that are the foundation of her practice. Published in conjunction with UCLA Hammer Museum

Avery Preesman's work makes the term "organic" relative. His paintings and sculptures naturalize our relationship to what can only be called a forest of signs, confirming the extent to which what we see and how we see it are in fact already abstract. Based on formal impressions of quotidian and personal subjects, Preesman's brand of abstraction is very open-ended. The elements of his work tend to be spare, their relationships simple, and the handling of materials highly tactile. Although the work is staunchly abstract, it is hardly autonomous, welcoming an engagement with architecture and unafraid to court idiosyncratic narratives. A quirky mixture of the symbolic and diagrammatic, Preesman's geometry is of the humanist variety where rationality is not privileged over expression, no matter how consuming the preoccupation with form and structure. This book, elegantly designed by the acclaimed Dutch typographer Walter Nikkels, is a companion publication to two exhibitions collaboratively organized by The University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and The Renaissance Society. These were the first exhibitions of Preesman's work in the United States. This book documents both The University Gallery's survey of Preesman's body of work to date, and his new works presented by the Renaissance Society, including several site-specific pieces. Co-published with The University Gallery, University of Massachusetts.

This catalogue accompanies the first solo museum exhibition of painter Scott Short. In Short's work notions of color and abstraction are boldly reinterpreted. His method of generating compositions is to make a black and white photocopy of a sheet of colored construction paper, and then makes a copy of a copy of a copy, until the result is hundreds of times removed from the original. Short then selects one of these many copies, enlarges it, and painstakingly copies it in paint on canvas. Despite its labor intensiveness, the procedural aspect of Short's paintings is subordinate to their effect. Visually, Short's paintings are Abstractions with a capital A. Once the photocopies have undergone the shift of scale and material that occurs when Short transcribes them as paintings, they become as a species of abstraction even Greenberg would acknowledge. The fact, however, that Short is dedicated to copying makes his painting the keepers of their own dialectic, in which roles become reversed. Although it is the photocopier that performs the creative role of abstracting, Short's mechanical manual labor allows the copy to become the original and the abstract to lay claim to being strictly representational. Michelle Grabner's essay explores the ideological intersections of copying, repetition, and manual dexterity in art practice. Hamza Walker's essay discusses how Short's practice nullifies the distinction between abstraction and figuration.

This catalogue is the first English-language monograph on the work of this French sculptor, who gained critical recognition as a member of the French movement Supports-Surfaces, founded in 1970. This group viewed the formal relationships between the surfaces and supports of artwork as actual rather than metaphorical manifestations of late 1960's Marxist sociopolitical thought. For Grand, the group's principles mandated not only a concentration on the support/surface relationship, but also a return to a simpler means of craft, and an emphasis on revealing the process of fabrication. For his solo U.S. museum debut at The Society in 2000, Grand exhibited two large works, each of which paired a piece of technology with a tangled mass of hundreds of irregular, wooden loops that he hand-carved from tree branches. Grand's juxtaposition of hand-crafted object and technological ready-made suggests a range of relationships between art and technology, nature and culture. This elegant book features numerous full-page reproductions of both The Renaissance Society installation and Grand's earlier related works. The catalogue essay by French critic and curator, Corinne Diserens, traces the formal and methodological development of Grand's work from1986, when he gave up working with wood, until his return to the material 15 years later.

Approaching architectural space and scale with the formal inventiveness and speed common to gestural abstract painting, Stockholder took the art world by storm in the late 1980s. The first half of the catalog chronicles Stockholder's installations from 1983-1991 in 35 beautiful color plates. Accompanying the reproductions are short descriptions, authored by the artist, addressing the architectural and material choices of each installation. The second half of the catalogue contains John Miller's essay "Formalism and Its Other", which keenly places Stockholder's activity somewhere between the rigorous formalism of Clement Greenberg's critical writing and the liberating potential of Allan Kaprow's Happenings. Published in conjunction with the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; text in Dutch and English