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Forthcoming Exhibition: Places I Have Never Been

I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that a collaborative exhibition I proposed to 1078 Gallery in Chico, California, has been accepted and scheduled for January 2014.




The gallery is a huge, marvellous space in this buzzing university town in northern California, which is also home to the Janet Turner Print Museum. The gallery hosts live events as well as exhibitions (see above photos), and my proposal consisted of a combination of these things. Called Places I've Never Been, it's a reimagining of two previous projects: The Lucerne Project (my solo show from 2011), and Climbing the Crooked Trails (my joint show with Patty from 2009). To quote from my proposal document:

The title Places I Have Never Been unites the common themes of these two bodies of work: imagining the lives of people in remote places; creating a narrative that is based on ‘facts’ but develops into a different, parallel, oblique form of ‘truth’; arriving at a third space somewhere between the ‘show’ of visual art and the ‘tell’ of written narrative. For 1078 Gallery, the exhibition will consist of the following:
  • The 100-page accordion book from The Lucerne Project – the large space will enable the book to be fully displayed for the first time.
  • The prints on panels from Climbing the Crooked Trails.
  • Some of the letters and photographs of the Reverend Victor Hugo Wachs – also displayed for the first time.
  • A new set of QR codes fixed to the gallery walls, linking to cloud-based audio recordings of Hartigan’s fictional Lucerne diaries, and McNair’s readings from her grandfather’s letters.
  • Related special events: an evening of readings by Hartigan and McNair, plus invited local writers, speaking to the theme of the show.
  • A printmaking workshop by Hartigan, demonstrating the paper-litho transfer technique that forms the basis of the accordion book and the prints on panel.
Patty and I are both extremely excited about this, and can't wait to get started on the additional work. 
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