Sasha Erfanian, Centretown News
PDA Projects gallery owner Brendan de Montigny is raising money to establish a publishing house. A Centretown art gallery is fundraising to add a publishing house to its operations.
PDA Projects on Elgin Street will soon launch PDA Press, with the goal being to publish visual art books by local artists and writers. With eight days left in the Indiegogo.com fundraising campaign, the gallery has raised 19 per cent of its $16,000 goal, which will be used to print and market the first three books.
Brendan de Montigny, co-owner of PDA Projects, says this money is enough to get PDA Press off the ground. “I’m pleased to actually say that we’ve reached the point where we know that PDA Press is viable,” he says.
PDA Press will start by publishing three books, focused on visual arts, but also including some poetry and prose. De Montigny says the main objective of PDA Press will be to support up-and-coming local artists.
“You might be an emerging artist and you might have never actually shown in an art gallery. You might have never been published, but your artwork is amazing. But, because you don’t have that context of having a beefed up artist resume, you can’t get into those publishing houses,” he says. “So we’re about taking those risks with those artists.”
Simon Honeyman is an editor for PDA Press, who also does work for larger publishing housese. He says he’s excited about PDA Press’s mandate to support up-and-comers.
“Their (larger publishers) mandate is to find authors and works that will sell, and it’s not that we’re not. We feel confident that people will be interested in these works, but the emphasis is placed more on exposing these new and emerging artists as opposed to championing well-established writers,” he says.
Guillermo Trejo is a Centretown-based artist who runs an Instagram account of photos of “old men who wear hats well.” PDA Press will be publishing a curated selection of these photos in a book called Old Man Fashionista.
Trejo says PDA Press brings something unique to Ottawa.
“Here in the city, I know there are small publications for poetry or novels or text-based stuff, but there’s nothing for visual arts,” he says. “So I think PDA could take this space and do more publication for arts.”
Ottawa artist Cara Tierney’s photographic essay will also be featured in PDA Press’s first publications, in a book called The Sameness Between You and I. Tierney’s essay documents the process of their double mastectomy and deals with issues of gender identity.
Tierney, who identifies as transgender, says, “For me the issues are breast cancer, and how the body constructs gender, and the other conversation has to do with transitioning as a transgender person, and how that can take many forms and how it needs to be acknowledged and visualized in many forms.”
Tierney says they’re excited about what PDA Press will bring to Ottawa’s artistic community.
“I think (PDA Press is) a progressive group of very dynamic individuals who are trying to make interesting things happen in our city, and we can always use more of that,” Tierney says.
De Montigny says he’s always been inspired by the local artistic community. In fact, the idea for PDA Press came from a fond memory of his from growing up in Ottawa.
“How I got into art, personally, to begin with, was when I was nine years old I won a little league baseball game, and afterwards as a reward my father took me to the… news and magazine book store on Wellington West, and he said pick any comic book,” he says, “and I picked this one issue of Superman and fell in love with this idea of an accessible art form.”