Front Forty Press teamed up with Matt Volla to produce his first book entitled Unruly Drawings. Unlike the established mode of blind collaborations between artists, Front Forty Press has been working closely with Volla to develop this visually rich feature. Matt Volla’s Unruly Drawings were initially received as thousands of digital files as well as in various densely packed notebooks. The digital files were organized and named by Mr. Volla in a range of categories from his Lexicon. Designer Dan De Los Monteros and art director Doug Fogelson adapted the story of the drawings into this book’s visual depiction of their progression. In illustrating the book, De Los Monteros was faced with the challenge of balancing multiple individual characters and groupings through many stages of development and evolutionary flux. Oakland based artist, musician, teacher, and surfer Matt Volla has been obsessively drawing amorphous kinetic creatures for years. These creatures were born into small-enclosed room like spaces where they bounced and slithered off the walls. They began to move faster and faster, growing and changing as they morphed and expanded beyond the walled boundaries. In our collaborative book, FFP has created a universe in which the drawings can evolve, flourish, have rave parties and battles, find solace, have existential crisis, animate, and become self-aware in the many ways they like. Volla received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Art with an emphasis in Sound Art and Sculpture. He received an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College in Oakland, CA. He has shown throughout America in solo and group shows including White Columns in New York City, Tangent Gallery in Detroit and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His film soundtracks have screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Matt teaches film studies and sound art and drives to the beach in his vegetable oil-powered vehicle. Unruly Drawings was concieved and produced by Doug Fogelson and Matt Volla. Designed by Dan De Los Monteros with an essay written by Yerba Buena Center Associate Curator Berin Golonu. Berin Golonu has been the Associate Curator of Visual Art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco since 2003. She first encountered Volla’s work in 1997 when she received an assignment to review a solo show of his “Knotology” work in Artweek Magazine. Golonu recently curated Volla’s project “Bartology” into a group exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts titled Sampling Oakland.