split/fountain. Book launch and presentation @ Motto Berlin
Please join us in welcoming Layla Tweedie-Cullen (Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Werkplaats Typografie, Walker Art Center) who will be speaking about her Auckland based project split/fountain, her recent distracted-workshop project at Brno design biennial and also introduce the distracted-reader publication series.
distracted-reader is a new publication series that seeks readerly parkour through selected terrain of art and design. We see rhythmised literacies of image, text, and concept. distracted-reader does thinking as making, and print design as speculative thought. With general art monographs as coffee-table artefacts, and university presses not funding conjecture, distracted-reader notes accented sequencing. Less clarion call to a vanishing new, more through-lines with incidents and discernible increments; writing and thinking as marked-up copy; stuttered narration; material views.
distracted-reader #1
distracted-reader #1 Mixtures: Xin Cheng and Allan Smith. 156 pages with drawings, photographs and texts by Xin Cheng, and drawings, photographs and texts by Allan Smith. The title Mixtures comes from a 2011 Xin Cheng exhibition; in this publication Cheng mixes memories of a Chinese childhood with recipes for healthy eating, photographed pages of anthropology texts showing Mongolian Yurts, and knitted socks from Scandinavia, images of ingenious low-tech merchandising stands in Cambodia, drawings of stone walls, and a bread igloo. Smith writes about the copiousness and fabricational inventiveness of Cheng’s practice, and about the accumulative materiality in the collages and architectural practice of ex-pat architect M.K. Smith. Allan Smith’s ‘un-illustrations’ set old school ink drawing and comic-book sequencing to work on the textured ‘push and pressure’ of a densely textured world.
distracted-reader #2
distracted-reader #2 Michael Parr and Blaine Western. A ridge, a section, an existing boundary, additions, a removed partition. A floor; concrete (where possible). 160 pages; includes 10 tipped-in colour plates. With essays by Michelle Menzies, Lance Pearce, and Henry Babbage. Parr and Western segue a photographic essay on the ruinous state of Barton Gillespie’s modernist house in Westemere into photographs of mutely eloquent architectural and landscape fragments taken in Los Angeles and Mexico. Menzies’ essay reads the Barton Gillespie house as a figure of rapport between people, topography and climate. Pearce considers the itinerancy and conceptual mobility of Parr and Western’s practice. Babbage reflects on the different audiences that Parr and Western’s temporary, quasi-architectural spaces create, and the way the spaces operate as platforms for occupancy and performance.
Saturday 28th June, 19.00 start.
Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
im Hinterhof
Berlin 10997
