It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image & Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

Intuitively and practically speaking, This Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist. Each career here, whether its arc is short or long, presents a new kind of way.--Eileen Miles "Poetry Foundation "

The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes "the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that," namely, "what familiar taxonomies cannot order." Hak Kyung Cha's piece-composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides-points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson's penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories like ecriture feminine, twentieth-century Language-school poetry, or non-diegetic experimental filmmaking, her selections, works produced over a span of seventy-one years from Charlotte Salomon's 1940 visual novel Life? Or Theater? A Song Play to Bhanu & Rohini Kapil's 2011 India Notebooks, defy easy classification.
Chris Kraus - --Chris Kraus "Bookforum "

Pearson outlines her own gender philosophies in art, along with the criteria for her self-confessed "surprising selection," omitting "obvious choices," to create an introspective, free-flowing collection that "will incite more questions than answers." Such is the nature of art, and a testament to this fine anthology.--Publisher's Weekly