The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas

An off-site exhibition curated by Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan

October 7 - 9, 2010

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan are continuing their on-going project to illustrate and translate Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas this Fall in Montreal. Seated at an iteration of Long’sBouvard and Pécuchet’s Invented Desk For Copying, a series of desk-sculptures pulled from the unfinished pages of Gustave Flaubert’s incomplete last novel, the two artists intend eventually to illustrate every entry in Flaubert’s posthumously published satirical dictionary – a text that contains 950 biting and surprisingly contemporary entries. They have compiled their collected illustrations to date in a new version of their bookwork, The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas. An edition containing the illustrations completed to date will be published by Artexte and will be launched later this Fall.

Long and Sullivan have worked on the Dictionary through more than a dozen illustrating sessions to date, which have included public drawing sessions at Printed Matter and Kate Werble Gallery in New York, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Mercer Union and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in Toronto, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

Co-produced with the Conference 2010 Res Artis, The Americas: Independent Artistic Practices in the Era of Globalization