Oak Knoll

"The opposite of love is not hate but power. Power obliterates another's individuality." - Marion Woodman

Limited to 32 copies, of which this is one of 26 standard copies signed and numbered by the artist / author, Mindy Belloff. A fine copy in fine clamshell box.

The volume is 300-pages, consisting of 75 folios folded into 19 signatures, with back endsheet printed letterpress. The text is digitally typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro with additional fonts (Lydian Cursive MT, Fine Gothic Medium, Luminari, Berliner, Berliner Fraktur, Garamond Premier Pro, and Goudy Text MT). The typography and page compositions were designed in Adobe InDesign over many hundreds of hours for more than 30 months. Image reproductions of artworks were painstakingly color-corrected in Adobe PhotoShop. A selection of drawings and photographs were manipulated in Adobe Illustrator. The text of the novels was digitally printed with archival pigmented inks on over 3,600 sheets, with an Epson Professional SureColor P600 inkjet printer. Most of the commentaries and calligrams were printed letterpress on a Vandercook Universal III Automatic Adjustable Bed Press (Uni III A/B), with a limited color palette of deep red, aqua blue, and grey inks. There are over 180 letterpress print runs. The pages are Crane's Lettra archival cotton rag text weight papers. The palette is limited, and the commentaries and page designs thoughtfully composed with reverence to the history of the book. The concept, designs, typography, research, artworks, and printing are by Mindy Belloff.

From the artist's website: "This volume presents a multiplicity of voices in discourse with Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary, and Sonia Marmeladov, female characters from 19th-century literature. Passages of text span centuries from ancient poetry, to 15th-century manuscripts, to contemporary songs, which communicate with the three literary classics. Narrative lyrics of featured musicians Joni Mitchell, Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman and others, with quotes of writers, philosophers, and poets are printed in the marginalia deconstructing the main texts. The three novels are condensed and combined into one volume, in dialog. The reader is challenged to engage with the book in a more active way than with a traditional linear reading, and to consider the commentaries in relation to one another and to the main texts. There are over forty reproductions of personal artworks, drawings and calligrams throughout the three hundred pages.

The main texts and translations were provided as public domain under the Project Gutenberg License (at gutenberg.org):
-Section I. Hester - text excerpted from The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850;
-Section II. Emma - text excerpted from Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856; and
-Section III. Sonia - text excerpted from Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866

Hester . Emma . Sonia is a layered narrative which recontextualizes the three novels, bringing additional voices to the fore. The edition was inspired by polyglot bibles (and includes passages in Latin, French, and Russian), illuminated manuscripts, and the Hebrew Pentateuch, which includes bible stories with annotations below or in outer margins. Among the historic texts included as commentary are passages from the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Witches Hammer (in Latin and English), a 1486 treatise used to instruct inquisitors on how to interrogate and convict people, primarily women, as witches or heretics. Also quoted is a poem from the fourth century Nag Hammadi codices, which resonates with several themes of this volume-I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the midwife and she who does not bear. Marion Woodman wrote in 1985, "women must learn to live in a world of paradox, a world where two mutually exclusive views of reality may be held at the same time."

Joni . Annie . Tracy the subtitle of the edition, highlights contemporary singersongwriters Joni Mitchell, Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman and other favored musical artists including Janis Joplin, Etta James, Leon Russell, Paul Simon, Mary J. Blige, and Laurie Anderson, whose poignant, poetic lines are familiar to a generation coming of age in the 1960s-1990s. Text of philosophers, writers, and poets such as Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Karen Horney, Julia Kristeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Bell Hooks, and Arthur Rimbaud, are incorporated into brilliant typographical designs, deconstructing the original narratives.

Introduction: In his Introduction, art critic and curator Saul Ostrow describes the volume as a dialogic and the texts as inter-subjective. Ostrow writes that no text stands alone, each is understood in the context of other text. "The work is a machine," Ostrow says, "with several systems working in coordination." He writes, "But there is still more to consider, in that the author of Hester . Emma . Sonia has not only brought together diverse texts depicting the relationships between women, desire, men, morals, betrayals, and ethics-she has added her own meta-text consisting of typography, graphic form, and design. Using these means, she has intervened-making what is often invisible, visible. So, while Hester. Emma. Sonia may polyvocally tell its own story, the medium is no longer presented as neutral. "

Appendix: The Appendix includes an Afterword written by Mindy Belloff with over 50 bibliographical references, more than 50 musical citations, and an image index of over 40 artworks and calligrams.

Images: Thirty-nine reproductions of fine artworks including paintings, drawings, and photographs, most from earlier in the artist's 40-year oeuvre, along with recent drawings and calligrams, adorn the pages. Belloff writes in the Afterword, "Personal narrative has defined my work over the years, and my own personal mythology informs the paintings, photographs, installations, and books I have created. In the early 1990s, as AIDS ravaged the lives of friends and creatives, I exhibited installations in New York, from a series titled Loss, Irony, Identity, with subtitles: Tell Me Why, exhibited at 80 Washington Square East Gallery, Witness, shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Empathy, at the Sculpture Centers AIDS Alcove. Many of the works reproduced in this volume are from these series.

from the afterword: we are of our generation. . . - Mindy Belloff, December 2021, NYC
I began work on this edition over two and a half years ago, before the global pandemic became a threat in March of 2020. Since this time in the United States, we have witnessed a divisive political climate, a global environmental crisis, and an enormous amount of suffering and loss to the Covid-19 virus and its variants. While New York City was under lock-down early in the pandemic to try to contain the spread of the virus, Black Lives Matter protests dominated news throughout the States and in the streets of Manhattan. This project was delayed as we adjusted to virtual schooling, a growing medical crisis in city hospitals, and new realities of mask wearing and social distancing. Plunging oneself into narratives can be a healthy way to balance daily angst, or perhaps a way to simply escape stresses. I surrounded myself with books, many on culture critique from graduate school at New York University.

Spending additional hours at home provided extra time to read and research, tweak designs through endless sleepless hours, and focus on new drawings and calligrams. I worked on all three sections simultaneously back and forth, before finalizing each one in succession, which became more complex from Hester, to Emma, to Sonia. I fed thousands of sheets through my inkjet printer one at a time, to accommodate for the thickness and cotton rag texture. On average it took three hours to print approximately 38 copies of one folio front and back, not including numerous drafts and proofs, multiple color corrections of each artwork, and page reprints through supply chain shortages and delays from the paper mill. After printing a small stack of folios, I brought the sheets across town to my studio to print the letterpress portions one
color at a time.

Music plays a prominent role in memory and culture, as well as in daily life. I often hear a particular song in my head in relation to a text. I carry the poignant words of these lyrics with me throughout the day and night, as they repeat into following days, as part of the discourse of the section of the story I am focused on. For example, when Sonia finally appears in Crime and Punishment at her father's death bed, Philip Glass' operetta played in my mind, and I designed the typography to coincide with the repetitious lyrics from Liquid Days. Towards the end of the volume, lines from The Beatles' song Blackbird with its original reference to the Civil Rights movement, is directly connected for me to the current Black Lives Matter movement.

As I re-read Susan Sontag's essay, AIDS and its Metaphors, Sontag referenced the last chapter of Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov dreamt that, "the whole world was condemned to a terrible, new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia." In his dream, the people "did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify." This reference to the cholera epidemic was the link in the narrative for me, to the current global health crisis we are now grappling with, and a chilling reminder of past health emergencies and the stigma of diseases. On the facing page, I included facts about the cholera outbreak in Russia from the mid-1800s, and statistics on Covid-19 from the World Health Organization.

About the Artist Mindy Belloff is an artist born and raised in New York. Her first introduction to studio art when a teen was at The Brooklyn Museum Art School, painting from models and learning intaglio techniques. She attended New York University (B.S., M.A.) and the San Francisco Art Institute. Mindy's fine books and broadsides may be viewed in over fifty special collections including the Library of Congress, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Library. She has exhibited at venues such as the Bronx Museum of the Arts and The Sculpture Center in New York City. Her mixed media installations were favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter in The New York Times, and her edition titled W2LZX received a Herzog Honorable Mention for Excellence in Book Design in 2010. Inspired by Alfred Stieglitzs Intimate Gallery of 1925, she opened Intima Gallery in upstate New York from 2013-2014, showcasing photographs, artist,s books, and fine prints on paper. Mindy Belloff is the first woman to recreate the Unanimous Declaration of Independence, as printed in January 1777 by Mary Katharine Goddard. She received a Puffin Foundation Grant supporting creative and innovative initiatives that advance progressive social change, for her contemporary edition of the Declaration, rewritten to include "all People."