The Portable Gallery
(visual poetry +)
The Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2002)
Exhibitions featuring The Portable Gallery Bookworks
Self-Publishing, Kunsttempel, Kassel, Germany (2019 )
Scratch, Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2002)
Third International Artists’ Book Exhibition, City Gallery, Oskola, Hungary (2000)
El Arte De Los Libros De Artista, National Biblioteca Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico (1999)
Poesia Totale, Galleria Civica Mantova, Mantova, Italy (1998)
3rd Wexford Artists’ Book Exhibition, Off Centre Gallery, Bristol, England (1998)
In The Spirit of Marcel Duchamp, Artpool, Budapest, Hungary (1997)
3rd Wexford Artists’ Book Exhibition, Wexford Art Centre, Wexford, Ireland (1997)
Bienale Internacional De Poesia, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico (1996)
Bookworks, AKA Artists Centre, Saskatoon, Canada (1993)
A Theory of Cinema
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1992)
Pages 40, (100 Copies)
This bookwork could be sub- titled a theory of silent cinema or a storyboard for silent cinema. The grid like structure on the page creates an optical phenomena known as after-image (please note: the illusory dots that appear in the space between the cells of the tiny cinema screens on the page). Beyond the first and last page there is no particular page order, so this book can be used as a shuffle text (if one wishes).
Après Artaud
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2018)
Pages 12, (3 Copies)
This bookwork was made for my friend Jurgen O. Olbrich, curator of the Self-Publishing/Publizieren als Kunst exhibition at the Kunsttempel in Kassel, Germany, 2019. I recently found these black and white Xeroxed text-images in a box in my studio. I think I made these visual poems 20 years ago, for-or-with Bob Cobbing. I believe that this little bookwork of found images is a fitting tribute to Bob, Jurgen and Antoine.
They Call It Stormy Monday...
W. Mark Sutherland
Writers Forum, London, UK (1999)
Pages 36, (100 Copies)
This bookwork was originally created as an 80th birthday gift for one of my mentors — British poet Bob Cobbing. He republished it under his Writers Forum imprimatur. Each page is a 200% magnification (enlargement) of the previous page, the process continuing until the image explodes out of the frame and off the page. By simply folding each 81/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper, and then stapling the sheets into a book like-form the process of magnification appears to reverse itself in the middle of the bookwork.
Hard Drive (12 Computer Generated Poems)
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1995)
Pages 12, (40 Copies)
I got a virus in my computer and when I turned on the printer it began dumping 30 plus pages of data. I enlarged some of the most interesting images on another laser printer. How do we interpret these found 20th century visual-poems? Maybe they will be decoded in the 21st century.
Language Decoy
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1992)
Pages 158, (100 Copies)
The antecedents for this work are the journals Art & Language (1970’s), Artforum (1970/80) and a good number of critical texts on Post-Minimalism, Post-Structuralism, etc. Phrases culled from these sources are juxtaposed to one another to create philosophical conundrums regarding contemporary aesthetics and poetic practice. Some of these phrases are particularly powerful when placed on objects (like mirrors, combs, buttons, empty boxes, etc.). I have used this strategy in a number of gallery exhibitions and it has proven to be quite successful in stimulating critical discourse and in some cases laughter.
Round
W. Mark Sutherland
The Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, USA (1999)
Pages 16, (100 Copies)
Round, as in spherical, but actually based on the idea of the musical round with words chasing one another in several directions... premise, how does one write a book using only four words that addresses the codex form and the process of reading (time and space)... you can begin reading this book on any page moving in either direction (backward or forward).
Dizzy Spells
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1996)
Pages 24, (250 Copies)
Since I wrote a book-review column for the Jazz Report magazine for many years, I thought I would use my jazz background as an excuse to explore the formal possibilities of language, image and sound. Dizzy Spells uses jazz as a convenient point of departure for my ongoing investigations of material, form and process (please note: rhythm and form are of primary concern in many of these poems). However, the poems are not intended as mimetic tropes of each jazz musician’s musical style. I think the corrugated cardboard folder and the blue and brown inks make for a very elegant presentation, also the double-sided cards offer the reader/viewer interesting juxtapositions of text and image as well as complimentary and contrasting musical styles (eg. Dizzy/Miles, Ornette/Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor/A. Braxton, etc.).
Have You Been Duchamp’d? Parts I, II, III
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1989)
Pages 29, (100 Copies)
The cardboard box format of this bookwork is a tip of the hat to Duchamp’s Green Box, White Box and Boite en Valise. Parts I and II are parsed texts from approximately 20 different critical sources including books by Schwarz, Lebel, Richter, Cabanne, Paz, etc. as well as journal interviews with Duchamp. Part II includes some of Duchamp’s favorite puns and even an excerpt from Dick Higgins Glasslass (was this piece written as an homage to The Large Glass and Duchamp?). Part III is constructed from found images and texts acting as readymades and/or assisted readymades.
NOAH
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1996)
Pages 40, (50 Copies)
A visual poem in flip book form... 40 pages... sound of the flipping pages mimics the sound of the falling rain or waves...Chicago bolts give this book a nautical flare/flair...
The Van Gogh Letters
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1988)
Pages 8, (100 copies)
This bookwork reconstructs Van Gogh’s last known painting Crows In A Wheat using a text produced on a typewriter. The image is a 100 % reduction of the original painting. This book is intended as a playful nod towards Van Gogh’s prodigious letter writing to his brother Theo (found in the collected volume entitled “Letters to Theo”).
The General Knowledge of Idiots
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1989)
Pages 40, (100 Copies)
This work could be described as both a ‘pataphysical bookwork and Wittgenstein’s legacy. Once again, I attack the physical conventions of standard book form. The text/images (graphemes) were created by cutting up a dictionary then drawing images and text from a paper bag... titles came later (please refer to Duchamp’s readymades)...
The Science Of Freud/
A Brief History Of Sleep
W. Mark Sutherland
The Portable Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1988)
Pages 20, (100 Copies)
A cheeky investigation of Freud and Surrealism — the light-gray text used as background in this bookwork is appropriated from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Pages, randomly selected from Interpretation of Dreams, seem to resonate with many of my own texts and images ... the correspondence of chance operations or wish-fulfillment on the part of the reader/writer? Likewise, this bookwork is a subversion of linear narrative through an attack on the physical conventions of standard book form (eg. texts on the page moving in two directions (up and down), two books in one... each with its own cover, a beginning but no apparent act of closure (pardon the play on words).
A Few Words About John Cage
W. Mark Sutherland
The Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, USA (1999)
Pages 16, (100 Copies)
I was reading M. Perfloff and C. Junkerman’s Cage Composed In America while in Rochester... created a collage from Cage’s mesostic Overpopulation And Art, Mureau, as well as other Cage statements, then manipulated and overprinted the collage on a Xerox machine to produce visual poems in what is commonly referred to as the “dirty concrete-style”... less the exercise of a palimpsest, rather, the investigation of actual printing as process and pure materiality — text as ink, text as image, text to page, page as visual field, etc.