Parasitic Ventures Press :: Mission Statement

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Parasitic Ventures Press is a press interested in artist books.

By our definition, the artist book is a highly mutable form, which connotes a contextual framework within which a work is produced rather than as a particular physical form. As Johanna Drucker has stated, the two structural elements of a book are finitude and sequence. We agree.

Our interest is in artist books that extensively use text as a medium. We are intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the subversion of text, particularly when the source text is of the ‘found’ variety.

(Please see bottom of page for a list of things we are definitely not interested in.)

The press has been variably active over the past fifteen-some years. Initially established in Montreal, the press has been located over a wide geographic range, including Saskatoon, Washington, Rochester, & Amsterdam. The press is currently located in Toronto, Ontario. To date we have primarily focussed on in-house productions, from handbound limited edition books to anonymous public-site interventions.

We have shifted our focus to produce work by other artists and collectives.

Using appropriate technologies, we hope to foster an increasing range of critically-engaged projects. We are primarily pursuing inexpensively produced print projects. For the right project, we might also be interested in producing extremely limited edition ‘fine’ books in collaboration with producers.

Parasitic Ventures Press is interested in a wide range of projects and practices. We are not, however, interested in the following:

• portfolios of work that exist in a different format
• work which functions primarily as promotional material
• finely-crafted books with no critical aspect (we like them as fetishes, but we’re not producing them)
• narrative fiction (although fictions are always of interest)
& definitely no vanity projects (definition of vanity project here)