Events

Multiple Elementary
Book Launch

Tuesday November 21 at 5:30pm
READ Books at the Libby Leshgold Gallery

Please join us at READ books for the launch of Multiple Elementary by Helen Reed & Hannah Jickling.

Part exhibition catalogue, part artists’ book, and part candy store advertisement, Multiple Elementary explores the elementary school classroom as a site for the invention and reception of contemporary art practices. The book explores aesthetic and representative possibilities for process-based and publicly oriented artworks, especially amidst the complications and contradictions inherent to collaborations with children.

Contributors take-up adult-child relationships, the wildness of children and the contact-high they offer to artists attempting to recuperate wonder, failure, and queerness in their work. The commissioned texts also explore the reception of childrens’ art outside of the classroom, the unruly behavior of artist multiples and taste-making in relationship to the “Other.” Finally, a lexicon for curatorial, pedagogical and feminist-material-discursivity is offered to further locate Multiple Elementary amongst larger cultural questions.

With contributions by: Lorna Brown, Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Mark Clintberg, Jack Halberstam, Sydney Hermant, Vesna Krstich, Chris Lee, Stephanie Springgay, and Maiko Tanaka.

Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling have been collaborating since 2007. They are currently based in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations, and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter, and artists’ multiples. They are currently fascinated with the contact-high intrinsic to collaborative work, especially in their recent projects with children. They currently teach at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design where they received the 2016 Ian Wallace Award for Teaching Excellence. They are the 2017 recipients of the Mayor’s Arts Award for public art in Vancouver.

Multiple Elementary is co published by YYZBOOKS & Black Dog Publishing.

The artists would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the city of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.