Raeann
Van Zee

This project looks at the labor of the bookmaker, and more specifically my own relationship to labor and making. It also questions my relationship to gifts, and what compels me to give them.

I question the exchange between bookmaker and receiver: what are those on the receiving end gaining, and what am I the maker gaining? Is the relationship between receiver and giver a symbiotic one? Does bookmaking require an audience for the activity to be complete? What is behind my impulse to make and make and make, and then give it away? Are gifts a transfer, a rejection of commodification, or can gifts deplete the giver? Is this work liberating, its production ecstasy; or will I push myself to exhaustion, to pain to complete it?

This work attempts to answer these questions by examining the time spent manually and painstakingly producing a large volume of books, and ultimately giving them away.