The Whole Kit and Caboodle
More About EKLEKTICA
EKLEKTICA is an artist book mail service started by Maddie Bassani a soon to be graduate of Canada's #1 Art and Design School. The idea is that every month a new artist book will be created based on some eclectic research topic chosen by Maddie. One month may be focused on mediaeval menswear, another food of the future, and the next could be the art of body hair. Who knows? The world is too vast and rich in its splendor and curiosities to not focus on the obscure and weird. My aim is to teach an interesting fact of life each month in a tactile and illustrative way. That being said the books will be informational and academically researched. The book's form will be different for most issues; the materials and mediums will be very experimental. I might make my own paper for one, and work with only transparent materials for another. In short, I'm using $26,000 CAD + to curate a monthly book where research informs content and materials... then I'm mailing it to you!
What is an Artist Book?
There are a great many definitions of an Artist Book, some expansive and loose and some very narrowed. To me and for our purposes an Artist book is an art object that references the conventions of the standard book form.
It may be a pile of loose pages, or a book of entirely pop-ups, or pages made of different furs, or leaves sewn together, or just a single sheet of paper folded. An artist book takes what we recognize from books and transforms them into something we never imagined through art.
Historically Artist books have most often shown up as small batch books made by artists through cheap means and distributed locally, like Zines.
Why is this important?
Art is what fuels us, we do our best in our free time to surround ourselves with it and liven up our homes. Or we consume its various forms as entertainment. We give art our attention in order to exchange with it emotional impact. Art keeps life breezy. I'm trying to contribute to that in a way that is easy and accessible to people, because not everyone has the time or want to go to a gallery anymore, so I'm sending the gallery to you.
And of course with the infiltration of AI in our online spaces the ability for us to share human art effort and imagination is becoming harder to achieve. This project thankfully remains out of the realm of AI and exists only in our physical world, passing from my hands to yours.
Selfishly this is also and excuse for me to amass of wealth of useless knowledge on hyper-specific topics.
Who is Maddie Bassani?
Maddie (Madison) Bassani was born in the bushes of Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. She was birthed in August of 2004 as a response to the events of 2001. By that I mean the first Shrek movie came out and it took her mother 3 years to pop out a little ogre of her own.
Since then Maddie has been a tornado of artistry destroying peoples lives and wallets one town at a time. Hopping from instrument to instrument, play to play, medium to medium art continues to seep in and out of her clogged pores like a wet sponge.
This project for her is the start of a legacy. A physical step towards immortality. These books and the contents thereof are an extension of her body, mind and soul. This is... EKLEKTICA
