“Invoking European travelogues describing new worlds and exotic peoples during the Age of Exploration, the black and white laser-printed accordion book combines a multitude of drawn and found images interspersed with cryptic text. This fictitious tale of discovery charts man’s desire for conquest, which includes mastery of all sorts of knowledge gleaned from print material ranging from anatomical prints and mathematical puzzles to blurry half-tone representations.” – Kerry Anne Morgan for the Mid-American Print Council Journal
A Brief Report on the New and Prestigious Towne of Canada explores a population of men, heroes and failures in a future vision of Canada. The book begins with an explosion, a birth, and follows varying tensions of masculinity and growth, reaching a climax, followed by a section of somber darkness and finally death.
Formally the book is a 62-page accordion fold, made as a single 27.5-foot print, that can pull out of the blind embossed front cover, extending into one, long single page. The elimination of a cut fore-edge and gutter provides a continuous image surface, allowing the narrative to unfold in a traditional, linear, scroll-like fashion. Page breaks follow fold lines and dictate the placement of some written content, while other typographic experiments require that entire sections be laid flat to read.
The images, textures and patterns are all found materials, which explore the halftone and the pixel, attempting to merge the traditional graphic languages of print and digital in an experimental hybrid. Nearly all written content originated as a collection of poems by the artist.

Available from: http://www.paperpusher.ca

About the artist: I work primarily in the mediums of collage, text, print-based multiples and occasionally with relational/installation-based projects. I focus heavily on story-telling techniques that attempt to unpack popular Canadian & American mythologies in whimsical and historically slippery ways. Seeing the collage original not as an end, but instead as a means to a final print, I often enlarge my works to make visible the delicacy of the paper and ink used in a specific era of source imagery. Through my digital process the original becomes an inexhaustible plate from which variable prints will be pulled. In my collages, the grotesque and awkward gestures of the human body are emphasized through remixing body types, bits, features, and limbs, while seeking a beauty only found in discomfort. With nostalgia I hope to elicit unfolding family myths that can be recounted to a point of fiction. I use language much like a painter uses a palette. I rely on absurdity to refrain from finger-pointing at what upsets me in the world. Humour becomes a practical device to deliver a softened sadness and emptiness that I know from wrestling with myself. In trying to understand my own masculinity, relationships, and fragmentary family unit, I am carrying, and laying to rest, a handful of feelings around heroship and failure.

Operating the means of production directly, Paper Pusher Printworks makes the relationship between form, content and design a primary strategy for the creation of unique publications and print-based multiples. Utilizing obsolete and affordable technology, like the Risograph, scavenged and repurposed paper stocks, and used equipment; the Printworks’ goal is to collaborate with artists who are interested in the investigation, purpose and pleasures of paper-based print publications in an age often threatened by blossoming digital platforms. Our publishing mandate is anachronistic, whimsical and romantically absurd. Our publications often seek a speculative curiosity cast into the future of culture, or reflecting on forgotten aspects of history. Seeking to find a balance between analogue and digital influences, the press looks towards Canadian and international, contemporary, emerging artists & authors working both traditionally and experimentally. Fiction, poetry, manifestoes, theoretical tracts, conceptual texts, typographic experiments, and print-based art comprises the catalogue. Producing small runs requires close relationships with selected North American distributors. We also find our readership directly through book-arts-related exhibitions, small press/zine fairs, and even by setting up shop directly in the street. Originating in Montreal, Paper Pusher Printworks recently relocated to Toronto and is quickly establishing itself as a center for the production of paper-obsessed, print-frenzied, art and ephemera.