• Run O' The River / Bitter Medicine / Linda Zeb Hang, Keith Graham
Run O' The River / Bitter Medicine / Linda Zeb Hang, Keith Graham Run O' The River / Bitter Medicine / Linda Zeb Hang, Keith Graham

Run O' The River / Bitter Medicine / Linda Zeb Hang, Keith Graham

Books


FA.B131.3048
1 volume (unpaged) ; 5.5 x 15 in
2022
Sming Sming Books
Softcover, saddle stitched (staple bound). Cover is letterpress printed. 
Edition of 300. Originally published in 2022 by FIST and Thingmaker as an unbound letterpress book in an edition of 12, printed at the Center for Book Arts, NY.
Cover letterpress at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA, by Keith Graham and Linda Zeb Hang
Interior printed at Lightning Press, Santa Clara, CA
Published by Sming Sming Books 

"Our collaborative project entitled Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine is a printmaking odyssey and book expedition through psychedelic terrain. Visionary poems, drawings, schematic assemblages, instant aura-reading photographs and encoded glyphs congeal to reveal psychic and hypnagogic micro-climates. We offer a guided meditation, presented in media res, on the realization of simple truths—to open a window into a deeper relationship with our surroundings. 

Visually, Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine embeds hard-won esoteric knowledge in a mapping of internal landscapes. Drawing on personal experience and interaction with place, our interests collide creating fissures, oblique intersections and ambiguous storytelling that both hides and reveals an intricately woven yet frayed environment. Using a direct but persistent devotional code we have reprogrammed our mark-making voices, working collaboratively and spontaneously, collecting and generating information to arrive at a knotty mixed-media synthesis.

In this moment, on the cusp of widening medicinal and recreational adoption of psilocybin, flexibility, instinct and intuition have been our chosen guides. Our tools are digital, machine age and ‘primitive.’

Within lies spacecraft language, two toilers’ take on no-zones cultivated through technical experimentation, not hesitating to get dirt under our fingernails. Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine sets out on a naturalist-adaptationist voyage into brutal, implacable terrain, as difficult to subdue as the wind, piercing gaps in the gates of perception with pure oxygen."

— Linda Zeb Hang and Keith Graham