| Title | Cities and Skies |
| Artist / Creator | Alicia Bailey |
| Press Name | Ravenpress |
| Artist's Nationality | United States |
| Place of Publication | Aurora, CO |
| Publication Date | 2018 |
| Author of Text | Italo Calvino |
| Contributors | Lauren Winges |
| Process / Technique | bound book: laser etching, laser cutting scroll: laser printing |
| Number of Images | 10 |
| Structure / Binding | Rigid pages sewn across the spine |
| Medium / Materials | aluminum leaf and pigment, silk and linen threads, laser toner, book board, book cloth, paper, wood, linen ribbon, acrylic rod, aluminum tape |
| Paper Stock | cast acrylic (plexiglass) |
| Number of Pages | 14 (7 two sided, including front and back covers) + scroll |
| Dimensions (WxHxD) | 5 x 5.75 x 2 inches |
| Edition Size | 9 + 1 a.p. |
| Box / Wrapper | Box is considered part of the book. |
| Signed & Numbered | Yes |
Cities and Skies by Alicia Bailey
$800.00
Cities and Skies uses excerpts from Invisible Cities, a novel by Italo Calvino, © 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. Calvino's book presents descriptions of 55 imaginary cities as told to Kublai Khan by the explorer Marco Polo. For this piece, I've worked with the five cities in the 'Cities and and the sky' sections of Calvino's book - Eudoxia, Beersheba, Thekla, Perinthia and Andria. Lauren Winges created the original drawings, which were converted to digital files for laseretching onto cast acrylic pages. A series of threads connects the outside front cover through each page to the outside back cover; each side of the rigid, transparent pages features one of Lauren's drawings and includes the name of the city that inspired the drawings. The full text of the five chapters used as the basis for the project is printed on a scroll that is mounted in its own compartment in the box the book is housed in.
Artist Bio
Studio artist/gallerist Alicia Bailey, is affiliated with several professional organizations and is is owner/director of Abecedarian Artists Books in Denver, Colorado. She is also a member of Denver's Spark Gallery. Alicia acts as an independent curator/juror, instructor/mentor and regional events coordinator in the book arts. In her studio work, she has focused on book and box arts since the mid-nineties, producing box works, artists' books, sculptural books, limited edition books. Her work has been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibits throughout the world and is held in numerous public, private and special collections. An archive of her work is under development at University of Denver Penrose Library Special Collections.