Garry Neill Kennedy | E

Garry Neill Kennedy

E

Halifax, Canada: self-published, 2012

[unpaginated], 27 x 21.2 cm., softcover

Edition of 12 signed and numbered copies

For his June to July, 1980 exhibition at Eye Level Gallery in Halifax, Garry Kennedy modified the gallery's IBM electric typewriter by removing the bottom of its lower case “e”. Over the course of the show, all the correspondence sent by gallery staff was copied and placed in the exhibition space. 

It’s possible that the choice of the letter ‘e’ is a reference to American poet e.e. cummings, or to French author Georges Perec, who famously wrote the 300-page novel La disparition (1969) using only words that did not contain the letter ‘e’. 

The work predates Kennedy’s later interventions - such as CORRECTIONS (Anna Leonowens Gallery, 2012) and HORIZONS (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1980/2024) - and seemingly straddles Concrete Poetry and Institutional Critique. I’m reminded of the Michael Fernandez rubber stamp “The roll of the artist run centre is to bring down the government”, which went out on every letter from Struts for a month, presumably including their communication with the government agencies that funded them [see below]. 

*Printed Matter lists the date as 2012 and Eye Level Gallery as the publisher. Peter Trepanier’s comprehensive book Garry Neill Kennedy Printed Matter 1971 - 2009 lists the work as self-published, and from 2006. However, Trepanier’s book doesn’t extend to 2012, so I’ll leave the date as 2012. However,  Eye Level makes no reference to the publication on their site so I’m going to assume that it was self-published also.