Wendy Gomoll

Happy Birthday to Wendy Gomoll, of Paul+Wendy Projects. 

Derek Sullivan | Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library

Derek Sullivan

Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library

Sackville/Toronto, Canada: Umbrella Projects/Art Metropole, 2021

[unpaginated], 26.5 x 19.7 x .07 cm., softcover

Edition of 400

For many years now, Derek Sullivan has been drawing the 16-page signatures from Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957, a catalogue of ephemeral artworks published by Art Metropole in 1984.  Painstakingly rendered by hand, the resulting book drawings are then disrupted with additional interventionist illustrations: rainbows, ragweed, dandelions, birds, and other items are drawn as if scattered across the pages.

This project binds these drawings together to mimic the original book, a copy of which the artist bought at a library deaccession sale for four dollars. The cover of Ex-Library is the only aspect of the book not hand-drawn, it is replicated to look exactly like Sullivan's library-laminated well-worn copy, complete with classification label and remainder sale sticker. In this way the object of the book functions like a decoy for the original, something Sullivan has consistently worked with in his practice. 

Priced the same as the 1984 publication, this new bookwork examines “the poetics of circulating artworks and the content that they pick up along the way.”

Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library is available for purchase from Struts, The Owens Art Gallery and Art Metropole, for twenty dollars.

"As a meditation on both the subject and object of things Derek Sullivan continues his experiment in “slow reading” with the final half of the Evidence of the Avant Garde (ex-library) project. He presents 6 “press sheet” drawings of Art Metropole’s remarkable 1984 publication Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957 (an exhibition catalogue charting Art Met's first ten years via their collection of distributed artists projects). The drawings are created using a somewhat shabby ex-library copy and formatted as printer sheets (as they might have appeared as they came off the printing press). Each of the drawings are interrupted by a new secondary scatter that creates an assemblage of content and form that weaves both the material of the catalogue with observations from Sullivan’s every day. Weeds, prisms, rainbows, exhibition pamphlets, metro tickets obscure the pages as a poetic reflection on the unpredictable pathways and networks that works-in-multiple move upon.

The exhibition also includes a selection of 2021 drawings from the series Every day is the same. Every day is different. This project includes a sequence of daily drawings that arises out of tracings of an Enzo Mari-designed Formosa perpetual calendar (produced by Danese Milano in the early 1960s). The calendar, an ex-display from a bookstore Sullivan worked at in his 20’s, seemed to speak to the current rhythms of living in pandemic lockdown. Pandemic time wanes like that of a perpetual calendar — as an asynchronous rhythm that hums like the murmured heartbeat of the Avant Garde. The process of a drawing-a-day: Trace each panel. Update the day. Finish the drawing before going to bed. Each one different, each one the same.”

- BlogTO, about Sullivan’s September 2021 exhibition at Susan Hobbs Gallery

Owens Art Gallery

Last month the Owens Art Gallery launched a new section of their website, detailing all of the publications produced or available from the gallery. 

Mount Alison University’s sole imprint, the Owens’ publishing program has been active since the 1960s.

Available titles include works by or about Anna Torma, Derek Sullivan, Leah Garnett, Rita McKeough,Erik Edson, Ray Fenwick, Daniel Barrow, Andrea Morton, Garry Neill Kennedy, David Hoffos, Diane Borsato, Thaddeus Holownia, George Bures Miller, Jim Dine, Alex Coville, and myself. 

Alongside numerous monographs, the Owens has also published group exhibition catalogues, including the fascinating Warps, Heddles, Shuttles and Sheds: The Art and History of Weaving at Mount Allison University, which I reviewed here, and The Closer Things Are, here. For the latter, I collaborated with Micah Lexier on newspaper interventions that were published locally on the day the exhibition opened in the various towns it traveled to. 

The online catalogue was made  possible thanks to the work of J.E.A. Crake ArtsWork Publications Archive and Distribution Assistant Caitlin Gallant (2025), and 2023 Bourne Internship Community Engagement and Access Assistants Ranz Bontogon (2024) and Sophie Giese (2023).

View the publications here:

https://owensartgallery.com/publications/

This afternoon, the gallery launches a new publication by Thaddeus Holownia and Harry Thurston, 

 at 4:00 pm. Of A Feather is the their third collaborative book project, featuring twenty-one photographs of birds by Holownia, and poetry by Thurston. 

Derek Sullivan | Books Wanted

Derek Sullivan 

Books Wanted 

Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2022

8 1/2 x 11"

Edition of 60 signed and numbered copies [+10 APs]

An update of one of my favorite Derek Sullivan works, in which the artist seeks to find obscure artists' books using the kind of fly post with tear-away phone numbers that you would advertise a missing dog or a refrigerator for sale. The type of ad that might be pinned to a laundry room or post office cork board, or taped to a lamppost. 

The original dates back to 2004. This new iteration is a risograph thermography print, with pinholes in the top corners. 

It is available from the publishers for $50 CDN, here.  

Derek Sullivan | Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library

Brooklyn Rail Art Books editor, Megan N. Liberty - who has previously reviewed the Siglio Press reissue of John Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), Blurred Library: Essays on Artists’ Books, Richard McGuire’s Art For The Street 1978 – 1982 the Steven Leiber Catalogs, and many other titles that readers of this blog would likely be interested in - published a review of Derek Sullivan's Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library, yesterday. 

She writes: 

"Within the field of artist publishing, there are several dividing lines between cheap and expensive, multiple and unique. Against this context is the work of Derek Sullivan, an artist who engages in a “distributed art practice.” Interested in ephemera (which is sometimes an artist book and sometimes not), networks of distribution, and how materials are activated through circulation and use, Sullivan’s latest book translates an exhibition catalogue documenting ephemera (audio tapes, manuscripts, buttons, and books), from a 1984 show at Art Metropole into an artist book.

In 1984, to celebrate their 10 year anniversary, the “artist-initiated” bookstore, distributor, and publisher Art Metropole, founded in Toronto by the artist collective General Idea, held the exhibition Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957 showcasing ephemera gathered from their archives that illustrated the avant-garde art and publishing ethos of the 1960s onwards. Using the materials they gathered over the years, Art Metropole presented a story of conceptual art featuring artworks and ephemera by Constance De Jong, Ulises Carrión, Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, and many others. As the accompanying catalogue notes, “fragments, ephemera—‘evidence’—of a network of ideas and phenomena which came to be known collectively as Conceptual art, and the manifestations which continue to give life to many of the principles activated by that network of ideas.” The show was grounded in the archive: “to call something an archive is to impute authoritative and definitive organization of material and information, and yet the material under discussion was in large part realized in this form in order to bypass the validating and authorizing mechanisms of gallery and museum (and likewise archive).”

Continue reading at Brooklyn Rail, here. 

Derek Sullivan | Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library

Derek Sullivan

Evidence of the Avant Garde Ex-Library

Sackville/Toronto, Canada: Umbrella Projects/Art Metropole, 2021

[unpaginated], 26.5 x 19.7 x .07 cm., softcover

Edition of 400

Last week Roula and I hosted a Zoom conversation with Derek Sullivan as one of our final duties as Co-Directors of Struts Gallery. Unsurprisingly, it is the publications that we feel most proud of during our brief stint at the Artist Run Centre (though the Cube event was pretty magical, too). These include a series of eight posters, a record by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a book by Nic Wilson, a forthcoming book by Izzy Francolini, and the above title by Sullivan. 

The latter three were a result of a collaboration between Struts Gallery and the Owens Art Gallery, which we dubbed Umbrella Projects (a slight inside joke as umbrellas are pretty useless here, because of the super strong winds). The plan was to join forces/resources to facilitate non-gallery programming during the pandemic. I was bored at the prospect of countless online exhibitions so we took out ads in magazines asking artists what they wanted to do instead. 

Derek Sullivan's proposal was one of the stand-outs of the almost hundred applications we received.  

For many years now, he has been drawing the 16-page signatures from Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957, a catalogue of ephemeral artworks published by Art Metropole in 1984 (see previous post).  Painstakingly rendered by hand, the resulting book drawings are then disrupted with additional interventionist illustrations: rainbows, ragweed, dandelions, birds, and other items are drawn as if scattered across the pages.

This project binds these drawings together to mimic the original book, a copy of which the artist bought at a library deaccession sale for four dollars. The cover of Ex-Library is the only aspect of the book not hand-drawn, it is replicated to look exactly like Sullivan's library-laminated well-worn copy, complete with classification label and remainder sale sticker. In this way the object of the book functions like a decoy for the original, something Sullivan has consistently worked with in his practice. 

Priced the same as the 1984 publication, this new bookwork examines “the poetics of circulating artworks and the content that they pick up along the way.”

It's a really gorgeous bookwork. It's available for purchase from Struts, The Owens Art Gallery and Art Metropole, for twenty dollars.

Some quick housekeeping: big thanks to our collaborators at the Owens (Emily Falvey, Lucy MacDonald and Rachel Thorton), to the Umbrella jurors (Lucas Morneau, Lacey Decker Hawthorne, Rebecca Blankert, Hannah Bridger, EF, LM, RT), and to everyone at Art Met for joining on as co-publishers (Jonathan Middleton, Blair Swann, Sara Maston). 

The Sweetest Little Thing

The Sweetest Little Thing event takes place tonight, including an online auction of affordable small artworks. These are two things we won last year, by Amanda Fauteux and Hannah Bridger: a cigarette as candy and cheezie as sculpture. This year’s event includes a work by Roula Partheniou (see previous post) as well as works by Micah Lexier & Jon Sasaki, Andrea Mortson, Lacey Decker Hawthorne, Paul Butler, Kerri Reid (A Bernie Sanders w/Mittens finger puppet), Derek Sullivan, etc. etc. 

All funds raised benefit Struts Gallery and The Owens Art Gallery. 

To bid, visit the 32Auctions site, here:

https://www.32auctions.com/slt2021

Derek Sullivan | ¶ * † ‡

Derek Sullivan's exhibition ¶ * † ‡ closes today at Susan Hobbs Gallery, in Toronto.

The exhibition features 8 large scale drawings based on books: one each for Martin Kippenberger's Pscyhobuildings and the National Gallery of Canada's Donald Judd catalogue (both of which Sullivan has mined before) and six for a lesser known Art Metropole publication called Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957.  Subtitled Selected Works from the Collection of Art Metropole Including Audiotapes, Records, Videotapes, Film, Multiples, Kitsch, Manuscripts, Stamps, Buttons, Flyers, Posters, Correspondence, Catalogues, Porn, T-Shirts, Postcards, Drawings, Poems, Mailers, Books, Photographs and Ephemera. Toronto, Ont.: Art Metropole, 1984, the book is edited by AA Bronson, Peggy Gale and Christina Ritchie.


"Derek Sullivan’s drawing series examines the question of how a book is perceived and the potential it carries. While many can appreciate a good story transporting us to a different head space, Sullivan wonders about the spaces a book physically travels throughout its lifetime. How many places does a book travel to and what does it pick up along the way?

In ¶ * † ‡, a closer look at Art Metropole’s Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957 reveals 6 new drawings that depict what one can only guess is the beginning of the book’s journey – the printing stage. In each work, 8 pages of the catalogue sit on the surface horizontally, forming a signature. The tops of the pages face one another, inviting a tilt of the head to read the content. The de-familiarized portrait of the book serves to emphasize the physicality of the codex.

Art Metropole’s original book illustrates a period in the artist-run centre’s existence that analyzed the distributive works from their collection up to 1984 when it was first published. As the front cover of the book states, “Evidence of the Avant Garde Since 1957 consists of: selected works from the collection of Art Metropole including audio tapes, records, videotapes, film, multiples, kitsch, manuscripts, stamps, buttons, flyers, posters, correspondence, catalogues, porn, t-shirts, postcards, drawings, poems, mailers, books, photographs and ephemera”. Sullivan’s drawings play with the content, serving as a replica to the original publication, while also introducing content that is replicable and multipliable in its essence. Signifiers collide and scatter on the surface, suspending the timeline of where content begins and where it ends."

- press release

For more information, visit the gallery website, here.

Derek Sullivan | A piece of glass

Derek Sullivan
A piece of glass 
Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2018
50" [approx.]
Edition of 100

A glass prism, metal rings, coloured cord, foil stamped die-cut cards. The first 15 copies are signed and numbered and feature metallic gold foil stamp with gold cord, and sell for $250. The remaining 85 are grey foil stamp with blue cord and are available for $75.

"A publication to hang in a window, a bit of wonder when conditions permit."

- Derek Sullivan

Derek Sullivan | The Missing Novella

Derek Sullivan
The Missing Novella
Oakville, Canada: Oakville Galleries, 2016
2 pp., 23 x 15 x .6 cm., poster on boards
Edition of 300

Derek Sullivan's practice has long-featured the book as both form and subject matter, as well as the notion of the decoy (not to mention his love of the concertina). This beautifully designed project combines all three - a folded poster is wrapped around two stiff boards to suggest a novel.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, from September 15th to January 3rd, 2016 at Oakville Galleries, the title features a text by curator Jon Davies and photography by Toni Hafkenschied.

This Week on Tumblr: Covers, Citations, Tributes and Parodies

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com

Bookclub Spoils

Multiples, Multiples, Multiples: Public Lecture & Art Fair

I've just finished amassing images of over 500 artists' multiples for a slide show to accompany a panel discussion about artists editions tomorrow night at Ryerson University.

Myself, Derek Sullivan and Roula Partheniou will each present some of our own work and some of our favourites, and then participate in a moderated discussion, followed by audience Q&A. I will also  present a brief introduction on the historical origins of editioned artworks.

Multiples, Multiples, Multiples is a Free Public Lecture & Art Fair presented as part of the The Converge Lecture Series.

Tuesday February 24th
7:00 to 9:00pm

School of Image Arts
3rd Floor Soundstage
Ryerson, University
122 Bond St.
Toronto, ON

Multiples Panel Discussion

Last month Roula Partheniou and I gave a presentation to students at Ryerson on the topic of Artists' Multiples, followed by a brief workshop during which they transformed about $80 worth of dollar store crap into prototypes for multiples. The follow-up will involve their presentation of the eventual works they produced, and a panel discussion, which will also include Derek Sullivan. It takes place a week from today. The press release is below:



Multiples, Multiples, Multiples
Free Public Lecture & Art Fair
Tuesday February 24th

School of Image Arts
3rd Floor Soundstage
Ryerson, University
122 Bond St.
Toronto, ON

The Converge Lecture Series is excited to present artists Roula Partheniou, Dave Dyment, & Derek Sullivan for a lecture on artist multiples. Following the lecture will be an art fair, where students and artists in the Toronto community will be selling and/or showing their multiples.

For more information, please contact: convergelectures@gmail.com

Derek Sullivan (b. 1976) is a Toronto and Forest Mills based artist. Last year his work was included in exhibitions as Galerie Emmanuel Hervé (Paris), Galerie Tatjana Pieters (Ghent), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), City Art Centre (Edinburgh), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton) and Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon). His books and editions have been published by Paul & Wendy Projects (Toronto), Art Metropole (Toronto), Boabooks (Geneva), Printed Matter Inc. (New York), The Power Plant (Toronto), Poligrafa (Barcelona) and Bywater Bros. (Port Colborne). He holds a BFA from York University (1999) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2002). He is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery (Toronto), Galerie Emmanuel Hervé (Paris) and Galerie Tatjana Pieters (Ghent).

Dave Dyment is a Toronto- based artist whose work encompasses audio, video, performance, and writing. His editions include Fifteen Minute Fame (2009), Sgt. Pepper's extended Lonely Hearts Club Band (2008), A Drink to Us [When We're Both Dead] (2009), and the artist book Pop Quiz. His work has been exhibited in Chicago, Dublin, Edmonton, Halifax, London, New York, Surrey, and Bulgaria. He is the co-editor of One For Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions. Dyment is represented by MKG127.

Roula Partheniou is an artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Her work is marked by a concern for marriage of material and form and is drawn together by a strong sense of both logic and play. Using familiar objects as a starting point, she plays simple games using the objects' own inherent rules and physical properties to transform them, often employing processes such as repetition, permutation, multiplication and duplication. Partheniou graduated from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and is represented by MKG127 in Toronto.