Derek Sullivan: Waiting Game
October 17, 2009 — November 14, 2009
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Derek Sullivan #25, #25, | ||
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Derek Sullivan Manuscript for Wattle and Daub, 2009 Mixed media, several elements in diverse materials |
JESSICA BRADLEY ART + PROJECTS is pleased to announce Derek Sullivan’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, WAITING GAME (on view from October 17 through November 14)
Derek Sullivan will show eight new drawings from his on-going “Poster Drawings” (2006 -2009) series. These works will be accompanied by a meandering multi-element sculptural work entitled Manuscript for Wattle and Daub (characterized by the artist as a ”manuscript for a potential artist’s book”). Last year Printed Matter, New York, published Sullivan’s Persistent Huts, an accordion fold-out book inspired by Ed Ruscha's famous Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). He is currently collaborating with Micah Lexier on the publication of a multiple work on paper.
Sullivan’s poster drawings “grow” their titles in time, inherently documenting their progress from inspiration to display to collection in a process much like the cumulative layering of traditional wattle and daub construction. In this respect Sullivan conceives his work as being in process, changing metaphorically in time, but also physically as in his earlier Brancusi-like tower (Power Plant 2005) or Toronto Sculpture Garden kiosk (2005), which both invited incidental additions of posters that built upon one another over time, modifying the underlying form. In this exhibition the earlier black Plexiglas work by the door shows the accumulation of dust and dirt, finger marks and other traces of its “life”, physically “documenting” the work’s various moments of exhibition. Moreover, Sullivan has installed this exhibition with the poster works hung at an unconventional height in order to disturb the common expectation of eye level so that the full body of the viewer is reflected. For those familiar with Sullivan’s work of the past five years the sculptural installation operates as a compendium of the objects, design features, architecture and art that has interested and inspired him. He also quotes former works of his own in this piece whose title, Manuscript for Wattle and Daub* is in a sense also a description of Sullivan’s process of layering and quotation throughout his practice.
*a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet sand, mud or dung.
Over the past two years Sullivan’s work has been seen in Gasoline Rainbows at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007), Citizen, Denizen, Resident, Tatjana Pieters/Gallery OneTwenty, Gent, Belgium and Galerie Florence Loewy, Paris (2008). Sullivan was invited to make a work for the Bulletin Board series at White Columns (New York) and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery mounted a major exhibition of his work with a full colour catalogue, both in 2008. Sullivan was a nominee for the 2009 Sobey Art Award.
Artists:
Derek Sullivan