An exhibition at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre in downtown Ottawa was brimming with creative energy on May 8 as the second Object/Project Art Book Fair, hosted by Possible Worlds, showcased the work of 62 artists and publishers.
Two rooms at the centre were set up like a flea market of artists’ tables, while a third was reserved for artist and panel discussions scheduled throughout the evening. The fair also had a space for workshops, including one that focused on scrap binding, a quilting technique to make creative use of leftover strips of fabric.
A diverse range of publishers was present, from Concordia University Press to Kitschen Sink Press. The Ottawa Trans Library had a table promoting zines by trans authors, as well as memorabilia such as a book-shaped box titled ‘The Trans Agenda’ and smaller boxes depicting various pronouns.
What sets the fair apart from others is its focus on publishing and artist-made books, a lesser-known medium also known as accessible publishing.
The fair was organized by Melanie Yugo and Jason Stilz, co-founders of Possible Worlds — a community-driven, artist-run platform specializing in graphic art, print and electronic music. Yugo and Stilz said the fair was meant to promote the medium of artist books and the value of D-I-Y publishing, which Yugo characterizes as “making public” one’s works.
She described the artists they cater to as predominantly community-engaged creatives.
The artform of artist books has been around since the 1960s, according to Yugo, and the first art book fair was hosted in 2006 in New York City by Printed Matter under direction by Canadian artist A.A. Bronson, previously known for the artist collective General Idea. A second fair in Los Angeles followed in 2013.
According to the Printed Matter website, an artist book is the artform, rather than depicting separate mediums, such as an art book of an artist’s paintings, or career highlights of their photography.
Artist books are highly accessible because they’re inexpensive to print or publish and are typically free of the commercial constraints that come with a mainstream book publication. They can be freely reproduced.
This alternative mode of production and accessibility adds a layer of “oppositionality” to the commercial process, investing artist’s books with a political statement. “(They offer) a criticism of and alternative to these systems by circumventing them,” reads a description on Printed Matter’s website. “Understanding a book as an artwork invites a reflection on the properties of the book form itself.”
Larry Thompson, master printer at the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab and presenting at the fair as Greyweathers Press, said that artist books don’t fit into any fixed definition or category.
“Book arts focus on the craft,” he said, “while artist books … are more of a unique presentation of a story.”
They can be zines, printed matter such as “risographs” — images created with artistic use of a Risograph printer, itself a print duplicating machine like a photocopier — and traditionally-bound books using non-traditional elements such as wood, cardboard or other materials.
One of the exhibitors, Laura Blanchette, had a presentation of journalistic zines on her table under the name Good Golly Zines.
“When I was a (journalism) student at Carleton, we had a lot of conversations about what journalism should look like in the future,” Blanchette said. “With this project, I really wanted to try something else out and see if it worked, since there was a demand there.”
Blanchette’s zines focus local issues. She embarked on the project in January 2024 after finishing her degree at Carleton in Journalism and Humanities.
Her zines focus on transit, urban development and music, blending activism, journalism, art and indie publishing. Her Mid City series, produced as a staple-bound zine, covers municipal affairs and mixes printed type with handwriting, doodles, margin comments and photography, giving the pages the appearance of a scrapbook.
“It’s about doing journalism that is empowering,” Blanchette said, “not just giving people the facts, but also giving people the tools to engage in democracy . . . How can you get involved? Here are organizations you can get involved in, or here’s how you can find out who your city councillor is.”
She distributes her zines to various independent bookstores, cafés and community hubs, and also sells them online, making her journalism easy to access and inexpensively produced, representative of the democratic nature of the medium.
“I’ve been trying to include on the back (of the zine) an encouragement that people can share (it) with others and pass (it) around with their friends,” Blanchette said.
Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist Maura Doyle gave a 30-minute presentation covering the various publications she’s produced during her career. These ranged from her annual mail order catalogue collaboration with Annie Dunning between 1993 and 2004, the pamphlets she created to tie-in her ‘Erratic Boulder’ sculptures in Toronto and Vancouver, as well as her most recent work — a book titled Beaver Baffler: Architecture of the Universe (2025), which investigates the architecture of beaver dams.
‘I think it’s really exciting for Ottawa to have this fair. A lot of (artist books) come out of marginalized communities wanting to build their own networks . . . outside of the gallery. So if you’re an artist, it’s creating accessible art.’
— Maura Doyle, Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist
”A lot of the time, we didn’t know what we would send,” Doyle said of her catalogue during her talk. “The page was just a drawing and a cool idea, and then we have to interpret the item, and we (could) make whatever we wanted.”
Doyle, who collaborated with A.A. Bronson in 2007 when she sat on the board of directors at Art Metropole in Toronto, cites Bronson’s collective General Idea as an influence.
“I feel like I really came out of that tradition,” she said.
Doyle has described her approach as working through the process of a project, which inspires the end. She described her work in White Hot Magazine as “garbologic,” an exploration of excessive waste in a tongue-in-cheek way.
“I think it’s really exciting for Ottawa to have this fair,” Doyle said. “A lot of (artist books) come out of marginalized communities wanting to build their own networks . . . outside of the gallery. So if you’re an artist, it’s creating accessible art.”
