EVENT: YYZ LENDING LIBRARY LAUNCH | WHY SHARE BOOKS?
Mallory Wilkinson
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YYZ EVENTS LENDING LIBRARY LAUNCH | WHY SHARE BOOKS? YYZBOOKS NEW! ISBN: 978-0-920397-61-9 EXHIBITIONS ON NOW DANIEL HUTCHINSON | PAINTINGS FOR ELECTRIC LIGHT JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ | THE CHORUS GALLERY HOURS FOR INTERVIEWS
LATEST RELEASES click titles to order online ONE FOR ME AND ONE TO SHARE: ARTISTS' MULTIPLES AND EDITIONS ISBN: 978-0-920397-52-7 H& IT ON ISBN: 978-0-920397-60-2 ALSO AVAILABLE
Byproduct: On the excess of Embedded Art Pracitces Art and Cold Cash decentre Performance, [Performance] and Performers Pro Forma - Full Series afterthoughts
| LENDING LIBRARY LAUNCH | WHY SHARE BOOKS?
YYZBOOKS, 2012. Photo credit: Allan Kosmajac. WEDNESDAY 29 MAY 2013 ADMISSION “I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.” YYZ Artists’ Outlet is excited to announce the launch of its very own Lending Library. This initiative is aimed at making YYZBOOKS more accessible to the community. We wish to engage our visiting patrons by disseminating over twenty-years of collected Canadian art writing and to expand the discourse surrounding exhibitions presented in the gallery. After signing up for a free YYZ Library card designed by Bill Burns and Craig Rodmore, you will be able to borrow from our collection of available books published and/or distributed by YYZBOOKS. Two copies of each book will be available for monthly borrowing and the Library will run on an honour returns system. The Library will be launched with a special event, entailing the ribbon cutting of our new accessible display, and a presentation by Adam Lauder on the topic Why Share Books? Join the Library on this day and receive a gift just for becoming a member! Come check in and check out a book, and check back on our website for further information and news about upcoming Library events. WHY SHARE BOOKS? Lending libraries have rapidly come to symbolize everything that threatens law and order in the Harper state. How did we go from an image of libraries as dusty, staid places to one of “muzzled” librarians whose routine activities are seen as potentially destabilizing core government operations and interests? Sharing books sparks conversations—conversations about ideas, feelings and ways of working which increasingly authoritarian powers can only view as dangerously insubordinate or even insurrectionary. The freedom to read means thinking, creating and organizing without reference to algorithms, strategic plans and other instruments of control, that increasingly regulate all our personal and professional interactions. The creative and critical opportunities opened up by undirected reading and information exchange are limitless. But when unplanned change takes place on a community scale—when communities start accessing and sharing information on their own—power starts to worry. Why Share Books? will explore the increasingly contested status of the lending library as a site of community access, knowledge production and empowerment as reflected in a series of recent Canadian artists’ projects that all take the space of the library and everyday information behaviours as their focus. Works by Lee Rodney, Derek Sullivan, Vincent Bonin, Christine Swintak, Kristina Lee Podesva, Michael Maranda and others will be investigated as indexes of an emergent politics of information access that speaks to a deepening crisis in expressions of “publicness” in Canada. But the picture is not all dire. These artists’ projects also suggest ways of (re)activating the library, the book, and the document as tools for restructuring the social. Building on these precedents, Why Share Books? will set the stage for an open-ended conversation about reading and community that invites participants to share their experiences with books and libraries and to reclaim the simple acts of reading and sharing as tactics for renegotiating disenabling information flows and the power structures that they support. ADAM LAUDER is the editor of a book featuring new work by IAIN BAXTER&, H& IT ON (YYZ, 2012), that includes an essay by Lauder which outlines the first history of information art in Canada. He has also written a chapter on artist and marketing theorist Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) that appears in The Logic of Nature, The Romance of Space (2010). He has contributed articles to Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C, Hunter and Cook, and Millions magazines as well as scholarly journals includingTechnoetic Arts, Art Documentation, The Journal of Canadian Art History,TOPIA, and Future Anterior. He was W.P. Scott Chair for Research in e-Librarianship at York University, where he developed an online catalogue raisonné of the work of IAIN BAXTER&, the IAINBAXTER&raisonnE. YYZBOOKS
NOW AVAILABLE Explosion in the Movie Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists’ Film and Video is an anthology of contemporary reflections, scholarly texts, historical documents and visual documentation that examines the depth, brilliance and contradictions of Toronto’s media arts history and ecology. With a focus on artists’ film and video organizations, practices, manifestos, and guiding debates, this volume takes stock of where we’ve been and speculates on where we’re headed. Exploring such fundamental issues as censorship, the importance of festivals, the politics of representation, and the longstanding division between film and video aesthetics and institutions, Explosion in the Movie Machine should become a crucial document for artists, students, critics and curators in local, national and international media arts communities. Edited by Chris Gehman, the book features contributions from Kay Armatage, Jonathan Culp, Jon Davies, R. Bruce Elder, Richard Fung, Peggy Gale, Marc Glassman, Wanda Nanibush, John Porter, Taryn Sirove, Tom Sherman and Michael Zryd. CHRIS GEHMAN is a filmmaker, curator, teacher, and writer living in Toronto. He was the Artistic Director of the Images Festival from 2000 to 2004, has worked as an independent programmer for Cinematheque Ontario and the Toronto International Film Festival, and has curated film and video programs for venues in Japan, Serbia, the U.S. and Canada. He has recently written for exhibitions by Lindsay Page (at Gallery TPW) and Simone Jones (at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery). His essays on experimental film and video have appeared in publications such asMillenium Film Journal, Cinema Scope, Take One, POV, and Prefix Photo, as well as anthologies on the films of John Porter and Philip Hoffman, and he was co-editor, with Steve Reinke, of the anthology The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (YYZBOOKS, 2005). His films have screened at numerous international festivals and screening programs. He received an Honours BAA in Media Arts from Ryerson University (1993), and an MFA in Film Production from York University (2009). YYZ ARTISTS' OUTLET T: 416.598.4546 |
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Mallory Wilkinson
YYZ
T: 416-598-4546
F: 416-598-2282
W: yyzartistsoutlet.org
W: yyzbooks.com
YYretroZpective | An artist-initiated and self-curated take on the retrospective exhibition.
YYZBOOKS | OUT NOW: One for Me and One to Share: Artists’ Multiples and Editions, edited by Dave Dyment and Gregory Elgstrand. H& IT ON, featuring IAIN BAXTER& and edited by Adam Lauder
Upcoming exhibitions by Nestor Kruger and Sally Spath, Seri Pop, Hanna Hur, Nobuo Kubota, Michael Robinson, Maura Doyle.