Bibliography

 

My relationship with gallerist Michael Klein can be traced back to our shared love of books and records. We met when he would come to Art Metropole on Friday nights, for Cocktails. He had worked there a decade or so before me, and left to raise his two children. 

Once they were old enough, he decided to open his own commercial gallery, and invited Roula and I to join the roster. At the time (reductively) I made records and she made books. The three of us are also in Bookclub together, a group of ten artists, authors, publishers and curators who collect artists’ publications (the others members are Micah Lexier, Bill Clarke, Paul Van Kooy, Wendy Gomoll, Derek Sullivan, Sarah Robayo Sheridan, and Dereck McCormack). 

In 2018, MKG127 hosted a show called Record Shop, in which artists such as Sonny Assu, Deanna Bowen, Geoffrey Pugen, Marla Hlady, Christof Migone, Eleanor King, Jacob Whibley, Michael Dumontier, Suzie Smith, Instant Coffee, Jeffrey & Humphrey and Laura Kikauka presented work made with “record shop materials”, such as posters and playlists, and the vinyl record itself (it’s “material and sentiment”). 

Five years later, the gallery follows up with an exhibition about books. Titled, Bibliography, the show explores various formal and conceptual investigations into the form of the folio, the codex, etc. It opens today at 2pm. 

My contribution is the size-as photo above, titled Nothing To Infinity. 

For more information, see the press release below or visit the gallery website, here. 

July 8 – August 19

Opening Saturday, July 8, 2-5 PM

MKG127 is excited to present Bibliography, a group exhibition including new and existing works by gallery artists including:

Dean Baldwin Lew, Alan Belcher, Adam David Brown, Bill Burns, Michael Dumontier, Dave Dyment, Liza Eurich, Sara Graham, Instant Coffee, Laura Kikauka, Kristiina Lahde, Jason Lujan, Gwen MacGregor, John Marriott, Luke Parnell, Roula Partheniou, Geoffrey Pugen, Jayce Salloum, Monica Tap, Joy Walker, and Laurel Woodcock.

The format of the book has proved remarkably resilient in the face of breakthroughs in other technologies. Its early demise has been predicted continually – with the advent of cinema, television, the personal computer and the e-book reader. Even the phonograph was once cause for alarm, as evidenced in Octave Uzanne’s short story from 1894, The End of Books:

“If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.”

Bibliophiles needn’t have worried. While the death knell rang throughout the last century-plus, the codex held steady. Today physical books still outsell their electronic counterparts four-to-one. Sixty-eight percent of readers between the age of 18 and 29 prefer printed volumes, suggesting the trend is not drifting downward.

This exhibition celebrates the multi-faceted form of the book with a wide array of treatments, from foregrounding text, typography, the page, the title, or the cover, to using the form of the book as context for content.