Magazine Piece by Ian Wallace +
The Absence of John Knight’s Journal Series

May 2010
A Project by Vincent Bonin and Jon Knowles
Graphic Concept by Jeremy Stewart

Opening Hours
Thursday and Friday, 12 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 10 p.m. – 5 p.m.
2016, boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montréal

Talk
Sunday May 23, 2010 at 2 p.m.
2016, boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montréal
Vincent Bonin and Jon Knowles will present a talk entitled “Continuous Resources / Ressources continues,” followed by a reception.

“The cover and facing pages of a mass-media publication attached to a wall in a given arrangement until the format is exhausted.”
- Ian Wallace (c. 1970)

“…It consists of an apparently random (but actually rather carefully chosen) sample of friends, colleagues, collectors, curators, and critics, who each receive a prepaid subscription to a particular journal, selected specifically for the individual recipient.”
- Benjamin Buchloh (1986) on Journal Series by John Knight

Artexte has invited Jon Knowles and Vincent Bonin to curate a project around it’s holdings of artist’s books and periodicals published between 1965 and 1975. As an alternative to focusing on actual artifacts from the collection, they have reappraised two seminal conceptual artworks envisioned paradoxically as open-ended and situated gestures.

Separated by a gap corresponding to the shift toward post-modernism in artistic practices during the seventies, Magazine Piece (1970-) by Vancouver artist Ian Wallace, and Journal Series (1977-) by Los Angeles artist John Knight however share similar strategies.

Bringing these artworks to the present in a rented disused storefront on boulevard St. Laurent replays their criticality back-to-back within a larger economical context.

This project hovers between the display of artwork and the production of dematerialized forms of knowledge. Thus, it embodies metaphorically the ambivalent value given to sites/artefacts in which the visible and invisible share of research is negotiated. By reappraising Wallace and Knight’s works in a “third site”, which is neither gallery nor and information repository, the organizers, along with a graphic designer, underline how this temporal context is enacted at the intersection of various spatial and discursive configurations. SUPPLÉMENT 02, a publication designed by Jeremy Stewart, with texts by Jon Knowles and Vincent Bonin, will be available on the premises of the exhibition.