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Red Social – Portraits of Collaboration
By Alejandro García-Lemos and Cynthia Boiter, With a foreward by Ed Madden
You’re invited to a Launch Party!
May 9th, 2013, 8PM
The Friday Cottage
Tickets $25 ($30 for couples) include admission to the party and reading, an open bar, and a signed copy of Red Social
A collaborative work by artist Alejandro García Lemos and author Cynthia Boiter, Red Social – Portraits of Collaboration will release on Thursday, May 9th, 2013 as the 7th publication by Muddy Ford Press. Red Social is a visual and literary art book that evolved from a 2012 art exhibition by García-Lemos at the Goodall Gallery at Columbia College. The title of the book and exhibition, Red Social, translates to Social Network in García-Lemos’s native Spanish.
As he approached this body of work, which is made up of 24 unique portraits, García-Lemos who is a native of Bogotá, Colombia, focused on relationship-building and the community of fellow artists he had become enmeshed in in his new home of Columbia, SC. The sitters for each portrait were asked to bring symbolic icons for their sitting and many went so far as to collaborate on their specific portraits. “The creative space that opened during these sessions provided an atmosphere of candor which mimicked that of the therapist,” the artist says. “I came to realize the importance of a comfort level between the artist and subject and I chose people who have been supportive of me and are truly friends and family”.
Once the series had been exhibited, García-Lemos hoped to continue in the collaborative spirit so he approached local writer and editor, Cynthia Boiter. It was his idea to have Boiter create short fictional stories about the characters in the portraits—whether she was personally familiar with the characters or not—based on nothing but the title of the portrait and the various icons represented. Boiter says that, “Many of the friends about whom I wrote had to become strangers before they could become subjects about whose inner lives—their worries, fantasies, and insecurities—I could write.”
The result is a fascinating reverse-process of illustration. Based upon García-Lemos’s paintings, Boiter uses fiction to illustrate the portrait subjects. Each piece of short fiction—few are over 250 words in length—tells the tale of a unique individual with subject matters ranging from love to loss to issues of gender roles, new roles, and throwing off the roles society attempts to impose upon all of us.
A book launch party and reading will be held on Thursday, May 9th at 8 pm at The Friday Cottage on the corner of Richland and Henderson Streets in Columbia, SC. Tickets to the event are $25 ($30 for couples) and include admission to the event, an open bar, and a signed copy of Red Social. Purchase tickets at www.MuddyFordPress.com. Additional copies of Red Social ($25) will be available at the event or via MuddyFordPress.com, Amazon.com, and BandN.com.
