Coco x Love With Stranger
By Margaret Haines
Published by New Byzantium
Fall 2012
Soft cover, 6 x 8.24, 144 pp.
Offset, 16 color ills., 16 2-color ills., 112 b&w ills.
15.00$
ISBN: 978-0-9730005-2-8

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Coco x Love With Stranger, a new publication by Los Angeles-based artist Margaret Haines, is one in a series of ‘trailers’ for her forthcoming feature-length film Coco (fall 2012). Previous ‘trailers’ have included a performance at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a sound installation at the Cirrus Gallery, and a sculptural presentation at Commonwealth and Council Gallery in Los Angeles.
Coco x Love With Stranger explores different tropes of female identity - mixing personas, identities, some parafictional, some actual. Based on the narrative structure of Don Quixote, the book revolves around three female protagonists—Coco, a character that appears in Haines’ forthcoming film; Los Angeles artist and cult figure, Cameron (1922-1995), famed for her role in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; and Haines’s own ruminations.
Like Don Quixote, the film drifts betwixt and between states of consciousness and madness. Played by four actresses ranging in age from 3 to 40, Coco battles her own delusions of achieving fame as a pop star. As a character both hysterical and visionary, her delusions reveal radical realizations about the world and the construction of the self. The book presents a visual mash up of Coco’s inner compulsions and obsessions through film stills, collages of props, and photographs of the actresses who interpret on her scripts. Throughout making the film, Haines held varying degrees of closeness with the actresses, including acting as an on-call babysitter for the youngest ‘Coco.’ These relationships are presented in the book and insert the artist as a quasi-actress, collaborator and character.
Haines’s identity of raconteur/protagonist develops further with a diary-style essay about Cameron titled “Love with Stranger.” This essay presents an alternative to the hysteric girl-culture of Coco by introducing Cameron— a figure fully cognizant and in control of her own female identity, and whose own practice explored techniques of imitation and subversion. Following a trail of archival research on the life of Cameron, the artist eventually meets Beat poet Aya Tarlow, once Cameron’s confidante. This encounter leads to the re-discovery of a text Aya gave Cameron in the 1950s, and which Cameron later read on the radio in the 1970s, in an attempt to “free women.”
Coco x Love With Stranger is a 144 page soft-cover perfect-bound book published by New Byzantium in an edition of 500. Printed on newsprint in color and black and white, its format references 1980s teenage pulp novels. The film and its soundtrack (composed by artist Patrick Dyer) will be released in Spring 2013, on a usb silicone necklace made in collaboration with designer Arielle de Pinto.
Biography
Margaret Haines is a Los Angeles-based installation artist, performer, and filmmaker born in Montreal, Canada. She holds an MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts (2010). Margaret has exhibited work at LACE, Commonwealth&Council, and Cirrus in Los Angeles, the Harcoza store and gallery in Tokyo, and at the McCord Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.
Press Inquiries
E-mail: info@newbyzantium.org, mags.haines@gmail.com
Telehone: 213-207-6856
URL: http://www.newbyzantium.org, http://www.margarethaines.com
Address: 570 Crane Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90042

Margaret Honda, August 20, 2012

I am pleased to announce the release of a new print, 4366 Ohio Street Living Room. Published by Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, this three-color silkscreen was printed in an edition of 202 by New Byzantium, Los Angeles.

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4366 Ohio Street Living Room is the fifth in a projected series of eleven prints that comprise the larger work 4366 Ohio Street, a full-scale reconstruction of my childhood home in Southern California. Initiated in 2004, this project is ongoing until the house referred to in the title is completed. To date, the series has taken on the form of multiple print editions, each reproducing one room and published as an insert or as pages within a catalogue or periodical. The conditions of a specific publication determine an edition’s size, printing method, dimensions, paper, and color. An edition is developed by dividing a room’s surface area—walls, ceiling, and floor—into a grid with hundreds or even thousands of cells of equal size. The dimensions and total number of the cells are calculated so that a single cell is contained in each copy of the publication. An edition consists of individual prints of these cells at 1:1 scale, accompanied by a diagram of the room in which every cell has been assigned a different number. Each print bears a hand stamped number corresponding with that of a cell in the diagram, designating its specific location in the room’s construction. Both the number and singular placement make each print unique.
If all the prints for a room were assembled according to the diagram they would form a sculpture of that room, but this is an unlikely event. The prints are dispersed as part of the publication’s normal distribution process, causing them to be owned by people who in most cases are unknown to me or to each other. The closer I get to finishing the house, the more fragmented it becomes, structurally and geographically. The work, which someday will be complete in principle, can never be completed in fact–that is, assembled into a whole all of whose elements are present at once.
My parents never owned the house, but rented it for nearly 30 years. The house still stands today, having sold most recently in 1999.

Along with examples of the previous four works in this series, 4366 Ohio Street Living Room will be on view at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, through September. Also on view is 4366 Ohio Street Prospectus, published by New Byzantium and printed in letterpress.

BARA BY GRAHAM KOLBEINS
A bara letterpress.




SAM FEATHER
A small edition of poetry from artist Sam Feather. This project was hand typeset and printed in under a week while the artist was staying in Los Angeles. The final product was bound with red thread and distributed from the artist's shop in New Orleans.

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