Join us at Printed Matter / St Marks for a launch of Limn the Distance, by Rose Higham-Stainton. We will have a reading from the book followed by a conversation between Rose and Jennifer Kabat.

Limn the Distance, by Rose Higham-Stainton, imagines decentralisation through the poetics of Bernadette Mayer and the concentric communities of one mountain. From major cities to art worlds, godheads to bodies and the spaces they inhabit, it asks what happens when we move away from the assumed nuclei of these knowledge and value systems. Orbiting around one mountain in upstate New York, Limn the Distance speaks of and through the communities that have resided there—from the radical sectarian shakers, and efforts towards communitarian living and small-scale farming that have happened in their wake, as well as the life and legacy of Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Through personal narrative and lyrical essay, the book draws on communitarian and artistic traditions of decentralised practice and resists the easy binarisms of solitude and sociality, ruralism and urbanism.

Jennifer Kabat is a writer and critic whose book THE EIGHTH MOON on a 1840s agrarian socialist uprising in her town, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2024. Rose and Jennifer share an interest in communitarian practices, rural spaces, utopias (and their failures), ecology and poetry, which will be discussed on the night.

Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic interested in gender and art-making, material culture and resistance. Her work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published by LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review, Art Monthly, X-Tra, Bricks from the Kiln, Apollo, MAP Magazine and Worms. She has written several chapbooks. Limn the Distance is her first book. Rose teaches art writing in galleries, institutions and higher education, including at Amant (Brooklyn), Spike Island (Bristol) and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (Norwich).

Jennifer Kabat’s THE EIGHTH MOON on a 1840s agrarian socialist uprising in her town will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2024. Half of a diptych, the second volume NIGHTSHINING comes out in 2025. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and her essays have appeared in Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.

JOAN is a new publishing project for contemporary interdisciplinary writing.