A Wreath of Snakes (Bookstore Edition) by Nic Wilson.
October 9th – 16th | 115 Prince William Street, Saint John, NB
Shop hours: 9 am – 5 pm
A Wreath of Snakes (Bookstore Edition) is an ongoing project that looks at the place of artists’ texts in the continuum of art making and viewership. This edition of the project takes the form of a bookstore that works as a dissemination point for artist’s texts, a personal collection, and a site for production.
Artists’ Books have presented a problem for traditional gallery presentation because of their reliance on long term physical interaction. The act of reading a book is at odds with the tradition of anti-tactility in most gallery contexts and the inhospitable environments of many institutions. The form of a bookstore invites browsing and the possibility for connection with a book on a viewers own terms, if they chose to purchase it.
The bookstore also offers the opportunity to consider the position of the artist as an employee. Wilson is looking to explore what Michel de Certeau calls “la perruque”. de Certeau describes this as an employee taking back the time that they are selling to an employer to work on personal projects. During the artist’s time minding the bookstore, Wilson will be generating a new text based on his experience of employment.
Nic Wilson is an artist based in Regina, SK (Treaty 4 Territory) where he is a MFA candidate in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Regina. In the spring of 2017 he was the recipient of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Program Master’s Scholarship and his most recent work connects the queering of literary cannons with the history of anti-action in art making.
A selection of artists whose books will be in the store:
Sarah Tripp, Rebecca Martin, General Idea, Jan Verwoert, David Horvitz, Ingo Niermann, Kim Gordon, Maggie Nelson, Ilene Miles, Chris Krauss, Lee Lozano, Claire Ellen Paquet, Bas Medik, Sally Hill, David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska
A Third Space media release.
Third Space is an itinerant artist-run centre for contemporary art in Saint John, New Brunswick, committed to representing local, regional and national professional contemporary artists.
