Café Royal Books is a publishing house founded in 2005 by Craig Atkinson.
February will see the first ‘International Drawing Project‘. Craig is organising a series of events, which demonstrate the diversity and importance of drawing. Amongst the events will be an exhibition. He is approaching the exhibition in a similar way to publishing, and the exhibition will essentially be one huge book.
There will be a photocopier installed in the gallery for the duration of the project. Artists are invited to email a high resolution drawing-based image – I use ‘drawing’ in it’s broadest sense. From the submissions, images will be selected, printed, and hung in the gallery. The gallery will begin as an empty space [work wise], becoming busier and evolving throughout the exhibition. Visitors will be able to select work from the walls to re-print on the copier and bind into a catalogue before leaving the gallery. There will be a maximum of 1000 catalogues. They will be free of charge at the exhibition, for the duration of the project, after which the remainder [if any] of the 1000 will be available online at cost price. There will be several other publications released to mark the occasion, available both at the event and online.
From now until February 1st Craig will be accepting submissions [submissions are open to anyone and will be selected from]. Using wetransfer.com for example, you should send up to 10, 300dpi full colour or black and white, 210mm x 297mm [A4] images, and a word document stating your name, web site and country [location]. Email submissions are also fine idp@caferoyalbooks.com, please try to just send one email, rather than one per image. Some of the selected images will form part of the full colour event document in the case of your image being used, you will receive a copy after the event. All selected images will be printed in mono, up to 1000 times for the on-demand exhibition catalogue, and exhibition itself. I will try to document online, all selected images, artists and web links though if popular this might take some time.
Mike Redmond and Faye Coral Johnson will be artists in residence during the project, using the gallery as their studio.
There will be screenings and a drawing-based talk by an artist for whom drawing is central to their practise. There will be several book launches during the project.
The events will be held at PR1 Gallery, UCLan, UK[ the same venue as last years pop-up library] and supported by the Contemporary Arts Development Group. February 13th – March 2nd. Preview February 16th TBC.
If you have any questions please email Craig.
Submissions are open to anyone, anywhere, and will be selected from to form the exhibition.
‘Drawing’ is not necessarily pen on paper. Considerations will be made for photography, film, sculptural images, collage etc that is ‘drawn’ in some way or could be considered drawing. I am keen for the term ‘drawing’ to be manipulated.
