Torri, Paris
For ART-O-RAMA 2012, Torri Gallery will present the work of Gareth Long, Canadian artist based in New-York, for his second solo show in France. The project consists of pieces which are all related to literature and modernist tradition, two major elements of the artist’s work.
The installation is thought as an environment composed of a lamp, a desk, four books on a shelf, and a lenticular image. The four-books set and the lenticular image come from the same work. Untitled (Stories) is a series of works based on the cover of nine J.D Salinger’novels that were published by Little Brown & Co in 1991. The editor’s choice to use a rainbow-stripes logo for the cover of the books, long after the works were published, shows their will to remind a modernist aesthetic accurate at the time of the writing of the works. The original books are also exhibited, each book’s cover is erased (with sandpaper), only the emblematic stripes remain.
In a lenticular images series, Gareth Long rerecreates the cover patterns which are manipulated and distorted by the viewer/reader’s course.
Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Invented Desk for copying, a piece specifically made for the occasion, consists of a desk bureau inspired from Flaubert’s work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, an unachieved novel from the latter posthumously published in 1881. This desk, created for copying, is in many respects the continuation of issues at stake in previous works by Gareth Long sush as copying, translation, duplication, relations with literature.