woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131\nEverything in the world exists to end up in a book<\/em>, St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 proposed in his far-reaching aspiration for Le Livre <\/em>\u2014 the ultimate book that would encompass nothing short of the world in a single tome. This statement could double as a primer for Derek Sullivan\u2019s practice, where everything that passes through his hands seems to find its way into or out of a book. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nSullivan\u2019s recent exhibition Albatross Omnibus <\/em>is designed from the outset as <\/em>a book. An eight-foot-high concertina wall snakes through the first gallery, bisecting the space into two irregular shapes. On one side, framed drawings are hung like illustrated plates from an encyclopedia on modern-ist abstraction; on the backside, large photocopied images of an awkwardly bookish woman holding a novel are postered directly on to the drywall between exposed metal studs. Viewers\u2019 movements through the space per-form the act of reading, physically moving from one page to the next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sullivan uses the form of the book as a repository for the intersecting histories of modernism, architecture, graphic design, and the literary and visual arts. His drawings likewise bring together disparate references and aesthetic signifiers \u2014 colour, pattern, shape \u2014 especially ones that inherit specific, vernacular meaning through their use in culture. Sullivan\u2019s drawings capitalize on the arbitrariness inherent in abstraction, leaving the work open to numerous associations that extend into the past and the future. A gingham pattern, for example, could refer equally to Martin Kippenberger\u2019s paintings, Rei Kawakubo\u2019s clothing design, Brigitte Bardot\u2019s famous bikini. . . <\/em>and the list continues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The concertina wall that weaves through the first gallery cuts into the second, which opens up into a large space. Sullivan produced a suite of fifty-two artist\u2019s books, one for each day the exhibition is open. Though monumental in number, the books assume a modest format \u2014 pocket- size and paperback, with large type on sky blue covers \u2014 and invite an intimate reading. The content of each volume plays on the very idea of the artist\u2019s book \u2014 its conventions, its histories, and its possibilities \u2014 and underscores the idea of the codex as a formal and conceptual apparatus where a diversity of text, images, and subjects (from concrete poetry and art to anagrams and garden design) can seamlessly cohabit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet as a serious foil to the ease and intimacy of reading, the books are suspended on cords from the ceiling, high out of arm\u2019s reach. Three mobile platform ladders are available for adventurous visitors to mount and thumb through a dangling book. In so doing, the act of reading becomes conspicuously performative, evoking the idea that the work is inflected by our \u201creadership\u201d of it, and the reader becomes a co-author in the production of meaning. Sullivan\u2019s investigation into the form of the book illuminates a persistent desire akin to Mallarm\u00e9: a longing for the ultimate book that is just beyond our reach. <\/p>\n