Dave Dyment | Dead Ringer

Dave Dyment

Dead Ringer

Sackville, Canada: Self-published, 2023

107-minute film on USB drive, folded poster, printed materials

Edition of 5 signed and numbered copies [+2 AP]

Last month my film Dead Ringer screened as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, curated by Charlene Lau. I wasn’t able to attend but just received some photographs today and had a slew of emails - almost daily - for the first two or three weeks afterwards. All were very kind and sweet, with a few being particularly touching: 

"Dear Dave,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Ritica and I saw about half of your documentary, Dead Ringer, at Nuit Blanche this year. My friends and I found it extremely captivating but having walked for about 2 hours before getting there, we couldn't stand still for much longer and had to leave. 

I just became a Canadian citizen and, like many other immigrants, I am navigating complex feelings about what citizenship means in a settler-colonial state. In lieu of a big celebration, I wanted to watch your documentary in full with a few friends and reflect on Toronto, a city I have grown to love through the community I have built here. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find your documentary anywhere on the internet. So I thought I'd reach out and ask if it is available to stream somewhere (even if paid). 

I completely understand if that's not an option but thought I'd check in any case. 

Thanks so much for your time and your work.

Best,

Ritica”

and

"Hi Dave, I had the honour to watch your film last night and it was one of the best things ive sat through! It was engaging, thought provoking and what really made it special for me was the historical aspects as well as the commentary on national identity.

You see, I moved to Canada exactly 3 years ago and my favourite part about Toronto has been its Multiculturalism, even thought the internet doesn’t make it seem so- but I’ve been welcomed in most spaces I sought to enter - from museums using my student id to some of the best culinary experiences. I know your film was more so an exploration of where this identity goes, but for a new resident, I find comfort in knowing I’ll contribute to this identity, and it’ll contribute to my identity, whatever it becomes.

Ektaaghusari”

It’s not available online: partly to avoid litigation, as it’s comprised of hundreds of clips from other movies, and partly because I don’t view it as a documentary, but rather as part of an ‘installation’, with the city as backdrop doing most of the heavy lifting. 

Dead Ringer debuted at Casa Loma and had subsequent screenings at Toronto City Hall, courtesy of Ruth Burns and Ontario Culture Days. Ideally, I’d like to show it the University of Toronto, the RC Harris Water Filtration Plant, the AGO,  Kensington Market, and other areas featured in the work. 

Micah Lexier | Fig.79 – Drawing Kit

Micah Lexier

Fig.79 – Drawing Kit

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 2025

9 x 12 x 3/4"

Edition of 8 numbered copies

A boxed edition to commemorate a performative drawing work that took place only a week ago (see post, here). The kit contains fifty letterpress-printed sheets (8.5 x 11) and a 4 x 6”  acrylic template. 

Lexier’s MKG127 exhibition A Drawing and a Sculpture, closes today. For more information, visit the gallery website, here: https://mkg127.com/. 

Joyce Wieland Lane

Last month the Toronto and East York Commu­nity Council voted to rename a lane after renowned artist Joyce Wieland (1930–1998). Michael Snow, her husband of twenty years (1956-1976) was bestowed a similar honour in 2017. 

The proposal came from Toronto iconoclast (and Cork­town resident) John Goodwin, who first met Wieland in 1975 at the Ontario College of Art and Design. 

Slowscan vol 40

[Various Artists]

Slowscan Vol 40 

Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands: Slowscan, 2018

20 x 20 x 3

Edition of 97 [+3 AP}

A boxed set of seven seven inch records: Albert M. Fine (Fear No Forks), George Brecht (Drip Music), Joe Jones (Solar Music Hot House), Ken Friedman (Zen For Record), Charles Amirkhanian (The Type Without Time), Adriano Spatola, Gian Paolo Roffi (Autoroute, Al Capone Poem), and Pauline Oliveros (World Ear Project). 

A deluxe edition of 30 was released with an accompanying hardcover catalogue (Visual Vinyl) and two audio cassettes: a 1977 interview with George Maciunas and a 15-track collection of Dick Higgins’ work (see below). 

Imin Yeh | Thank You For Understanding

Imin Yeh

Thank You For Understanding

Pittsburgh, USA: e.l.hymns, 2025

252 pp., 4.25” x 6.87”, softcover

Open Edition 

Imin Yeh teaches at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and has been collecting student excuses for missing class for the past seven years, which are collected in Thank You For Understanding. The first and second editions were hand case bound by the artist. This third edition printing is in digest paperback, Yeh's favorite book dimension.

The title is vailable from the publisher, here, for $20.00 US. 

"The perfect holiday gift for the aging academic, optimistic new hire, or student entering the last third of the semester, Thank You for Understanding: Seven years of student excuses on why they will miss class, is now in the greatest of all book formats, the mass market digest. Fits in your jacket pocket! Meant for reading."

- Imin Yeh

Rene Ricard | God with Revolver

Rene Ricard

God with Revolver 

Madras, India/New York City, USA: Hanuman Books, 1989

104 pp., 23 x 14.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Born in Boston in 1946, Rene Ricard ran away from home several times, and by nineteen was living in New York City, where he became a protégé of Andy Warhol. He appeared in Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls, and the lesser known Kitchen (1965) and The Andy Warhol Story (1966), in which he portrayed Warhol, alongside Edie Sedgwick. 

Ricard wrote a series of essays for Artforum magazine in the 1980s, which helped launch the careers of Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Schnabel cast Toronto actor Michael Wincott to portray him in his 1996 film Basquiat, and Basquiat immortalized Ricard in the 1984 drawing Untitled (Axe/Rene).

In addition to his influential essays, Ricard published four books of poetry in his lifetime, with God With Revolver being his second. It was produced ten years after his first (the eponymously titled volume edited by Gerard Malanga and produced by the Dia Foundation1 in 1979). The cover features a photobooth portrait of Ricard wearing his signature replica Civil War cap (Union side), which he'd purchased in an East Village boutique. It includes poems written between 1979 and ’82. 

The collection was published by Hanuman Books2, which was founded by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. Ran out of the Chelsea Hotel, Hanuman published works by William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Robert Frank, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, David Hockney, Gary Indiana Francis Picabia, Jack Smith, Patti Smith, and many others. Letter-press printed in India and shipped by boat to NYC, the titles were designed to resemble prayer books, each identically sized at 7.6 x 10.2 cm. Except Ricard’s title - he agreed only to be part of the series if his title could be a full sized hardcover book.3

On the day of the final edit, Ricard dropped by the apartment of Raymond Foye, unexpectedly. While Foye diligently worked on revisions, deletions, and sequencing for the title, Ricard and a hustler he met on 42nd street smoked crack and disappeared into the bathroom to have sex. 

Titles like "Poem For Judy Garland” and “Joan Crawford Visits Her Folks” reminds me of the work of Cary Leibowitz, as does Ricard’s later text-based paintings (see example below). Ricard discovered that text paintings were more lucrative than poetry books, noting"I must be the first poet writing in English since Alexander Pope to make a living from his own poems."

God With Revolver is valued at around five hundred dollars. The title was reprinted in 2022 by Editions Lutanie which is also now out of print, but is available here for $22.00. 

"Rene once told me about his visit to the Andy Warhol survey at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston in 1966: “I sat in front of a large flower painting and planned out my entire life.” He was nineteen.

After seeing the Warhol show at the ICA and making a few connections in Andy’s scene, Rene moved to New York and began his apprenticeship at the Factory and Max's Kansas City, where he laid the social and aesthetic groundwork for his early poems. His milieu was always the art world. He disliked poets and the poetry scene— not enough glamor or money.”

- Raymond Foye, Woodstock, N.Y., 2022

1. The book was intended to be the first in a series, with later volumes planned by John Wieners and Angus MacLise. Ricard’s title was modelled after a Tiffany Christmas catalog and the costs - said to be ‘onerous' - escalated substantially. “Any departure from the Tiffany catalogue prototype,” he wrote to the designer, "would be a liability”. Future titles were cancelled and Ricard’s book was the the only volume produced for the series. 

2. Hanuman is a deity in Hinduism. 

3. Years later Maurizio Cattelan would make the opposite request: he would only agree to be part of the Phaidon Artist series if his title was produced a third the size of his contemporaries. 

Ida Applebroog

Ida Applebroog was born on this day in 1929.