News

dsbooks launched the FACING series to explore how art and travel intersect and challenge our perceptions, inviting readers to engage with the Other and the Different through intimate and reflective glimpses of unfamiliar landscapes, cultures, and ideas. As Miroslav Karić beautifully states in the text about the Facing series:

“FACING is about transformative exposures, about the experienced and the anticipated, about the indelible traces of geographies, stories, sights, sounds, and sensations that
become encoded into a human and an artistic being.”

“FACING is for all those who will find and reveal themselves in this special book series through their own experiences, for those who will love it as fiction, or forever carry it within as a unique space they visited.”

“FACING is an intimate testimony about the influences of the other, the unknown, yet desired, so that it can open our senses, liberate us in self-reflection, initiate us into new
knowledge, thoughts, and beliefs, and enrich us as human beings.”

The second volume in the Facing series, CALIFORNIA & ARIZONA, is more than a travelogue – it is a meditation on distance, transformation and the unpredictability of the journey. Weaving together photography and drawings created in a heightened state of mind during lockdown, Serbian artist Ivana Ivković delves into the heart of Americana culture and captures the American Southwest with a cinematic, on-the-road quality. The book unfolds like a film, immersing us in a landscape both iconic and elusive.

“This is the private landscape created by Serbian artist Ivana Ivković as she takes audiences on a visual tour—a leisurely, inspired drive through quintessentially American scenes. As she wends her way through canyons toward the cerulean blue ocean, she invites her audiences to a world of contrasts, from the sparkling Pacific waters to the desert heat of Joshua Tree and Arizona, from pristine wildlands to seductive strip malls and motels. This multimedia artist immerses the viewer in everchanging scenes, some of which are uncomfortably visceral. Audiences will feel both the region’s natural charm as well as its grossness, and the suggestive, almost garish depiction of the human body.”

“Ivković paints the sky blood-red—the water too—hinting at the ease with which a person can hide—or change their identity—in this enchanting and sometimes horrific part of the United States. She draws the human body in quick sketches, male and female subjects alike, mostly naked and sometimes wounded or aflame— holding wineglasses, sitting on the couch, or fornicating on the beach. This is a world where birds and breasts and male genitalia take off, transfixing the viewer in their manic depiction, only later to beg for forgiveness. Abstract and experimental, the artist toes the line between reality and fantasy, as though time has stopped in both a pandemic fever dream, and a love letter to SoCal and the Southwest.”
Excerpts from “Ivana Ivković: A Love Letter to SoCal and the Southwest”
by Charles Moore, art historian and curator