Derek Sullivan: Booklover

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Booklover is a word with many lives. Its latest is the title of Toronto artist Derek Sullivan’s exhibition, on view until April 23 at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina. Drawn from The Booklover, an ongoing project started in 2008, it’s also an epithet ascribed to the artist himself, whose long-running ventures with books suggest earnest appreciation.

Booklover details this 15-year preoccupation in which Sullivan playfully unbinds books from their traditional form and usage. His strategies of delimitation cover broad ground: the objecthood of the book and its contents in real, imagined and digital worlds along with conceptual positions, value, reproducibility and distribution.

Sullivan, an artist with a history of rethinking institutional conventions, and director/curator Jennifer Matotek created an atypical retrospective that addresses the challenges of gallery book display. It focuses on three areas: the book projects (in various delightful guises), a 2014 bunting piece (also titled The Booklover) and a new series of wall drawings. Sullivan’s panoply of bookworks are arranged throughout the gallery on 1920’s library tables, with his trademark suspensions of books frozen in flight.

The architecture of the book and the activity of readership, both embodied and cerebral, is integrated into the exhibition. The overall effect is of performing reading; viewers bend over, meander between tables, unravel back-to-front text, take 360-degree views and crane their necks. There are partial reveals and secretive volumes that can be read only by their covers, the interplay of titles occasionally creating a game of exquisite corpse. They suggest that an exhibition, like a book, collects, abuts, interprets and presents ideas through which a reader can travel and make connections.

Sullivan’s delight in literary tricks, word play and double meanings is evident. In works such as National Gallery Catalogue (2003), a conspicuous decoy of a rare catalogue is devoid of textual content, instead filled (as the adjacent ream of copier paper suggests) with blanks. A quote by Canadian poet Anne Carson (from The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos) comes to mind:

“All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings alongside our meanings. Gods flip the switch at will.”

Sullivan uses these strategies of ambiguity to flip the switch on what we think we know of both books and art as fixed objects. The idea that both exist conceptually and physically in flux is underscored by the inclusion of artwork that continues to evolve with the addition of new elements, instructional, relocatable drawings, and titles that are repeatedly struck out and replaced. This gives a sense of Sullivan’s ever-evolving practice, resulting in a living retrospective that is itself in flux.

Understanding of Sullivan’s work is contingent on the networks of which it is part, and a fuller picture is revealed only in the kind of context the exhibition provides. Like a good book, Booklover is worth spending time with.

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Dunlop Art Gallery

2311 12 Ave (PO Box 2311), Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 3Z5

306-777-6040

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