Halifax Art Book Fair

 

The above is our modest haul from the Halifax Art Book Fair last month, including titles by Sonja Ahlers, Nic Wilson, Serena McCarroll, Micah Lexier, Lenka Clayton, Sharyl Boyle, and Lucy Pauker & Mark Cruz. I’ll try to get to all of them shortly, once the last of the identity-theft administrative nightmare is over. 

Nic Wilson | What I Saw

Nic Wilson

What I Saw

Regina, Canada: Gravitron, 2020

38 pp., 6.5 × 4.3 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

"A collection of very short essays about looking, light, grief, photography, and decay. Part historic, part poetic, and part ekphrastic, these essays are immersed in other texts, other beings, and other people, from different times, and different places."

- publisher's blurb

Mailbag

 

The above items - save for a few - all arrived in the mail in the time when this blog has been on semi-hiatus. They, and other neglected titles, will appear in the next week or two, now that things have wrapped up at Struts. 

Nic Wilson | Learn Spelling

Nic Wilson

Learn Spelling

Sackville, Canada: Umbrella Projects, 2021

90 pp., 18 x 12.7 x .7 cm, softcover

Edition of 100

We're getting ready to wrap up our time at Struts Gallery, just as some publications we initiated are finally ready to launch. Joining the Beverly Glenn-Copeland LP of last month is new bookwork by Derek Sullivan, a new 'zine by Izzy Francolini, some forthcoming posters, and the above project by artist and writer Nic Wilson. 

Named after the menu item that allows you to train your computer to acknowledge certain words, the book uses a collection of unrecognized terms from the artist’s writings as a springboard for a larger investigation into how a living language evolves. Examples in the book - queer slang, loan words, Indigenous place and nation names, Arab and Japanese names, as well as terms specific to art theory - reveal a Eurocentric bias in Word Processing applications. They also double as an inadvertent diary of the artist’s writing. 

Hand-bound in an edition of 100 copies, the title features a collection of autobiographical anecdotes alongside observations and examples of the way “written English is used as a tool to create and legitimize some world views and negate others.”

Learn Spelling is available for $12 from Struts Gallery.