FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LOS ANGELES, CA.

The Paul Kopeikin Gallery is extremely pleased to present Several Artists Consider Books, a group show featuring artists in all media such as Abelardo Morell, Fawn Potash, Mike Cockrill, Buzz Spector, Alison Rossiter, Thomas Allen, Adam Stennett, Veronica Bailey, August Sander, Don Fritz, Thomas Allen, Dana Dekalb, Orly Cogan, John Cohen, Eileen Cowin, Sarah Cromarty, Angela Grauerholz, Jessica Todd Harper, Nina Katchadourian, Jason Clay Lewis, Jerry McMillan and Michael Harrington. This exhibition opens Saturday July 9th and runs through August 6th, 2005. A reception will take place on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The reception is free and open to the public. The gallery is located at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, just west of Fairfax. For information call 323-937-0765.

Abelardo Morell’s series of photographs of books is one of the most acclaimed and memorable series ever made on the subject. Margo Jefferson of the New York Times wrote that Mr. Morell’s photographs are about those moments when books take on meanings beyond their actual form or content-imagined narratives. Morell has used his camera to find out what stories these books had to tell.  "For me, the magic of these objects lies somewhere between a photograph of a book and the book itself." His most recent exhibition was at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mike Cockrill, "using ragged brushwork and a palette as faded as a Saturday Evening Post cover, mixes 1960s prosperity and Catholic piety with a kind of unwholesome prurience that grooves on Sis's underpants and Mom's high heels," brings to the show a twist on the act of innocent reading.

In her series “The Stacks” Alison Rossiter provides another view of the book-object. By laying each book open on a sheet of gelatin silver paper, and exposing the paper to the light of an enlarger, she creates unique photograms. Each book, though devoid of defining characteristics, nonetheless possesses great character, while the fanning pages suggest that reading is, in fact, an active pursuit.

Nationally recognized conceptual artist and critical writer Buzz Spector, has made frequent use of the book in his art, both as subject and object. "Mr. Spector’s bibliomania has been the driving force in his art since the 1980s, and his obsession with books continues to produce strikingly original work."

Fawn Potash is an artist, art educator and arts administrator active in the developing art scenes in the Hudson Valley and NYC.  As art critic and fellow artist Buzz Spector noted,  "The animation and expressiveness of Potash’s photographs ally them more closely with group portraiture than still life. Her precarious arrangements of old volumes have something of an auspiciousness of both book collection and lovemaking."

Eileen Cowin is a dominant artist for the landscape of southern California, Cowin has received numerous awards, among them are Individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979,1982,1990), a commission from the Public Art Fund in New York, an Individual Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles (1997) and a Completion Grant, from The Durfee Foundation (2000).   Eileen Cowin was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to do a billboard for Made in California and was selected to be the inaugural artist for the Metro Rail Light Boxes in Los Angeles.