Ricocheting quietly between photographic landscapes, drawn abstractions and poetic recollections, Ambient Park – the latest artist book from Shelter Press cofounder Félicia Atkinson – assumes the form of a deferred performance. Serving as a kind of response to the French artist and experimental musician's recent sonic and visual output, the book comprises a series of film stills shot during her travels to New Mexico and Arizona, overlaid with a collection of at once crude and delicate drawings made in Australia. Co-published by Shelter Press and Perimeter Editions to coincide with Atkinson's Australian tour as part of the Liquid Architecture festival, Ambient Park echoes of Brian Eno's On Land or The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd) as astutely as it offers a nod to the untethered line work and colour of Clifford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Amy Sillman or John Baldessari. Working to navigate a path across real lands, negative spaces and psychic topographies, Ambient Park manifests in the filmic trace, the words that spring to mind and the lines the body can draw.
24 pages, 29.7 x 19 cm, saddle stitched softcover Perimeter Editions (Melbourne) & Shelter Press (Rhône-Alpes)