Peter Happel Christian and Phillip Andrew Lewis | AA4

Peter Happel Christian and Phillip Andrew Lewis

AA4

Pittsburgh, USA: Clear as Day, 2019

12” vinyl record in cloth gatefold sleeve

Edition size unknown

In high school, a history teacher casually asked the class what instrument best replicated the human voice. A classmate ventured a guess: “The piano?”. “No,” the teacher replied, "the piano is the alphabet. The instrument that most resembles the human voice is the violin.” I can’t recall what point he was making about the violin, but the idea of the piano as the alphabet of music always stayed with me. I later learned that an early typewriter prototype from 1868 employed eleven piano keys [see below]. 

Renowned photographer Ansel Adams once aspired to be a pianist. His piano studies were central to his education, practicing for hours and hours, daily. During his teenage years at Yosemite National Park, Adams began writing letters to friends, family, other photographers, environmentalists, and politicians. Writing by hand was laborious and his penmanship difficult to read, so he quickly acquired a typewriter. 

According to biographer Andrea G. Stillman, Adams traveled with a portable model so that he could "correspond no matter where he might be: at his studios in San Francisco, Yosemite, or Carmel; in cities like New York, Chicago, or Washington; in remote spots like Whites’ Cabins outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, or on board a train in Wyoming or ship to Hawaii; or in any one of more than a dozen national parks as far apart as Maine and Alaska.”

The Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona- which Adams co-founded in 1975 - displays his “cute blue” field typewriter, which he reportedly took on all of his photoshoots. Tucked into the folder of the portable cover is a sheet of the artist's letterhead, onto which he has typed "I love this typewriter". 

The origin of Peter Happel Christian and Phillip Andrew Lewis’ beautifully produced AA4 is a found audio recording of a letter typed by Adams on the last day of the 1960s, the contents of which are unknown. 

An audio recording of typewriting by a photographer somehow evokes synesthesias while feeling rich in metaphor, even as one struggles to decode it. I can clearly conjure the thrill of their initial discovery. 

Happel Christian and Lewis promptly had the recording notated into sheet music - a score that features three different time signatures (Common, Waltz, and 5/4), three different tempos (52 bpm, 110, and 92) as well as a long pause. The pitches are at the discretion of the performer. 

They then commissioned artists and musicians (Lenka Clayton, Chris Duncan, Barbara Held, Michael Masaru Flora, Jonathan Kaiser, Tiffany Ng, Steve Roden, Greg Pond & Cesar Léal) to execute interpretations of this score.

The album opens with the sounds of Lenka Clayton (romantic and professional partner to Phillip) creating one of her brilliant typewriter drawings, a reproduction of which is included in the handsome portfolio. It also includes the original score, and a fold out essay by curator and critic Godfre Leung.

Lewis and Clayton are featured in an episode of Art21 which debuted this month. 

Happy Birthday to Paul Van Kooy

 

Happy Birthday to Paul Van Kooy, of Paul+Wendy Projects. 

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis | The Courier’s Dilemma

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis

The Courier’s Dilemma

San Francisco, USA: The Quarterly Report, 2025

12.6" x 9.7 x 4.4"

Edition size unknown

When we visited Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’ impressive Pittsburgh studio last year there were two mailboxes hanging on the wall beside the stairs leading up to the loft, one for interesting mail, the other for boring (see below). I suspect it began as an organizing principle and grew into an artwork. 

I might’ve pitched the idea of producing them as a Nothing Else Press edition if we hadn’t just produced this work with them the previous year.

The piece has just been announced as the second object project from The Quarterly Report (a spin off of The Thing Quarterly). The edition consists of two metal mail boxes with hand painted text, along with mounting hardware and key. 

The work evokes two favourites: David Shrigley’s NO JUNK MAIL, published by our mutual friends Paul + Wendy Projects, and Ben Vautier’s The Postman’s Choice postcard (a card with address lines on both sides). 

The Courier’s Dilemma is available from the publisher, here, for $275.00 US.

Holiday Mail

 

As one of the Christmas Cards that arrived today noted, an upshot of the lengthy Canada Post strike in November and December of last year is that the holidays are now somewhat extended. I was going to save some of these until December of next year, but I think I’ll post them this week, like the overly enthusiastic friend who wishes everyone Happy New Year well into March. 

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis | The Feather and the Meteorite

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis

The Feather and the Meteorite

Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2024

13.5"

Edition of 50 signed copies [+3 AP]

The 79th Paul+Wendy Projects project is by Pittsburgh-based artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, and was launched last month at the Pop-Up event at Art Metropole that P+W hosted with Micah Lexier, Guy Guy Guy, Slow Editions, Alicia’s Klassic Kool Shoppe, Onion Ceramics and Maggie Groat. 

The work is a mobile anchored by a piece of meteorite, around which a white feather orbits. See a video of the piece and purchase it here, for $190 CDN:  

http://www.paulandwendyprojects.com/feather_meteorite_mobile.html

Multiples Multiples Multiples opened minutes ago

The 2nd annual Multiples Multiples Multiples event is taking place today at Art Metropole in Toronto, from noon to five pm.

Who Has Seen The Wind?

Adjusting for inflation, Gone with the Wind (1939) is the top film grossing of all time. The Wizard of Oz - released the same year, and also directed by Victor Fleming - opens with the sound of wind. Oz fan David Lynch will often instruct his actors "More wind," when he wants them to imbue mystery and intrigue into a scene.

Wind is useful in an establishing shot of a film, so the audience does not misconstrue it as a still photograph. Swaying trees or tumbling tumbleweeds remind us we are watching a “moving picture”. Similarly, puppeteers leave the mouths of their puppets agape when they are in the background and not speaking, otherwise they may appear as inanimate objects. A close-up of a digital clock always catches the minute changing, and is often accompanied by a beep that would drive anyone crazy who actually had to listen to the sound 1440 times a day. 

Tonight in Pittsburgh, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis open a new show titled On Air. At the centre of his exhibition at 820 Gallery is The Wind, a new film work that compiles over a thousand clips from cinema featuring wind. They were diligently working on the piece last month when they hosted us,  and I have every confidence it’s going to be excellent. 

The opening runs tonight from 5:30 to 9pm at 820 Liberty Avenue. The exhibition continues until December 15th, Wednesday–Sunday 11am–5pm and free to the public. 

Pittsburgh

We just got back from a week or so in Pittsburgh, where Roula installed a small exhibition at Gallery Closed. The window gallery, in the Troy Hill neighbourhood, is operated by artists Phillip Andrew Lewis and Lenka Clayton, from their studio. The enormous former bank building (complete with functional vault) has two street-facing windows, allowing the gallery to be permanently closed and also continuously open. 

For a fourteen month-long series called Exhibition Copy, works by artists in the window space spill out into neighbouring businesses, residences and nearby school. The series includes projects by Martin Creed, Louise Bourgeois, Roman Ondak, Ryan Gander and others. Roula created a party room scenario reminiscent of fish-bowl party spaces and play areas where children celebrate in full view of passersby (like the one in the Rainbow Cinema in Toronto, which we keep threatening to host a party in for our friend Jon Sasaki). Balloons from the party appear to have drifted off and become lodged in the other windows. The painted cast resin balloons can be seen in the window for Ron’s Pizza Palace, a Public Notary Office, a former Beauty Salon and several other adjacent spaces. 

Troy Hill is also home to several “Art Houses”, the brainchild of collector Evan Mirapaul, who buys up dilapidated homes and invites artists to transform them into installation spaces. German artist Thorsten Brinkmann produced the first one, complete with Being John Malkovich style half-floors and passages to crawl through. Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski’s Kunzhaus followed in 2016. 

The most extraordinary of the three is Lenka and Phillip’s Darkhouse Lighthouse, which gutted the original home and built an elaborate lighthouse inside it. Mark Dion is currently working on the fourth home. A fifth possible space is currently covered in vines, with bricks from the crumbling chimney threatening to fall from the roof. All are located within a block or two of each other, with Gallery Closed close by. 

Affordable space in Pittsburgh means that artists can often rent out spaces and create DIY museums, billboards and restaurants. Jon Rubin (a co-curator of the Exhibition Copy series and one of our excellent hosts) has done all three. His work often explores the authority of text in the public realm, and his projects include Waffle Shop (Talk Show), The National Museum and the renowned Conflict Kitchen. More on these in future posts. 

Rich Pell has operated the Centre for Post-Natural History for about a decade. I was expecting a thrifty studio space with some objects on makeshift tables, but the presentation was top-notch, with a full library of books, museum-quality glass cases, audio descriptions, projected films and taxidermied animals. 

The week was pretty packed, and we only managed to visit three bookstores: Fungus Books and Bottom Feeder (both excellent and around the corner from each other) and Caliban, which - we later learned - was involved in an eight million dollar heist, regarding prints and plates cut from books from the Carnegie Library (read the story, here, at the Smithsonian site). 

Over the next week or so I’ll try to get to the above titles, which tell the larger story of some of the great places we visited. 

Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis | Sculpture Imaginer

Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis

Sculpture Imaginer

Pittsburgh, USA: Early Editions, 2023

6 x 9” 

Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies

Several years ago, on a road trip to Ottawa with our friends Jen and Stefan, the four of us conceived of an exhibition - only partly in jest - about plinths. It was to include works of art that were inseparable from the pedestals on which they stood. Things like Tom Friedman’s Untitled (A Curse), in which the artist employed a professional witch to cast a curse on the area above the plinth (and my friend Leah, who hired another witch to remove the spell). 

I think it was Stefan who proposed the exhibition’s title: Ace of Base. 

Sculpture Imaginer by Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis would be a perfect work for this imagined exhibition. A three millimetre chain is fastened to uncoated archival Mohawk paper laminated with black cardstock seam, allowing the viewer to conceive of an infinite number of sculptural forms atop the printed plinth. 

Sculpture Imaginer is available for $100 US, from the artists, here.