This is the second in a new feature of Artist Book suggestions from Anthony Elms. For more information, check the header on the first post of its kind. Today, Elms wants you to consider buying The Incredible Journey that is Consciousness, by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel, and Melissa Oresky’s Mineral Fabrics.

This is the “Who has time to read?” edition. Up to your ankles in work? Trying to manage the work you’ve gotten yourself into? I hear yah. Sometimes you need a book when you sit down with a drink in your hand but just don’t have mental energy to pay attention to plot twists and back story. Worry not, look below for lightweight tonic to cure your ills.

The Incredible Journey that is Consciousness by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel

Incredible Journey that is Consciousness by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel is small (5 x 7 inches), thin (32 pages), and slight (newsprint with a vellum bristol cover). But like all good overachievers trapped in unassuming packages it will kick your ass when you least expect it. Flipping through the pages, we meet Red Circle, Blue Square and Yellow Triangle as they love, laugh, try a ménage-a-trois, start a company, embezzle trade secrets from a foreign competitor, get caught, hightail it for the desert, learn a little about themselves during their convoluted escape, and finally decide that while they are each one good at heart, they may sometimes turn a little devilish when they interact and must give each other some space.

The Incredible Journey That Is Conciousness

Maybe I have embellished some plot details of this purely visual book, but it is hard not to when you sit down with this small package of delight. In fact, the only reason I don’t tell you to run out right now and drag this book home is that Golden Age, where I picked up my copy, closed January 24 to relocate in the West Loop. Opening date TBD. So you missed your window of opportunity. Now you need to wait until they reopen, at which point you should storm the barricades and hope they still have a copy. Did I mention this is only an edition of 500? Not nearly enough.

The Incredible Journey That Is Conciousness

So, in order to offer something you can take away right now to brighten the gray skies above I offer an alternative. While you are stalking the alleys of the West Loop, huffing and puffing until Golden Age reopens, slip in to Western Exhibitions and demand that gruff Mr. Speh hand over a copy of Melissa Oresky’s Mineral Fabric. Seems Oresky at first set her sights on outdoing Fuller & Usadel. Her book is smaller (6 x 4.75) and thinner (16 pages), but then she pulled that ship out of tailspin and went for broke with screenprint ink and nicely weighted black printmaking paperstock. As sloppy and wobbly in line as Fuller & Usadel are clean in shape, Oresky uses pastel colors to spin a woolly, stripped tale of pattern and confusion without wasting a single gerund. So action-packed is Mineral Fabric that a formal fender-bender breaks out on every page—spectacular enough to produce one bad-ass case of gaper’s delay. But you better act fast, did I mention Oresky’s book is an edition of 100? It is like these artists hate us or something. Don’t you bookmakers want us all to take home a copy of your hard efforts? Whatever.

Melissa Oresky, Mineral Fabric

No matter whether you zig or zag, both books have a touch of the playfulness and visual invention of Bruno Munari’s children books, or the more formal investigations of Dieter Roth. That goes beyond high praise. A word of advice: maybe you shouldn’t choose between them. Let he/she who has two pairs of pants sell one pair and use the cash to pick up both these little gems.

(written by Anthony Elms)