A Selection of Fragments | Libby Leshgold Gallery

With Publication Studios Hudson London, and Vancouver
Closing remarks at 4pm

Please join us on Saturday, September 15 in Libby Leshgold Gallery for the final event of It's Difficult to Put a Painting in the Mailbox: Toward New Models of Artists' Publishing.

A Selection of Fragments is a collection of unfinished work, germs of ideas, and fragmentary books from artists and writers, assembled by Louisa Bailey of Publication Studio London, Kay Higgins of Publication Studio Vancouver, and Patrick Kiley of Publication Studio Hudson. Gathering contributions through their local and international networks, the Publication Studios will work together to design and produce an array of very small publications — pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsheets, postcards, and the like — culminating in a one-day publishing event where the texts will be assembled, packaged and made available to the public. The event will close with a series of short talks starting at 4:00pm.

Publication Studio is a global network of independent studios that print and bind books one at a time on-demand, creating original work with artists and writers. Publication Studio is a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense – not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through physical production, digital circulation and social gathering. Together these construct a space of conversation which beckons a public into being.

Louisa Bailey is an artist, bookseller and publisher. She runs the London outpost of Publication Studio and is co-director of The Bower, a community interest company run collaboratively with Joyce Cronin in a former public toilet block and park keeper’s hut in Brunswick Park, Camberwell, South East London, UK. The Bower organises exhibitions and events, makes coffee and produces books with artists and writers by Publication Studio London on site. The artistic programme is driven by a shared interest in sociopolitical and feminist practice. Louisa is the Sales and Distribution assistant at Book Works and founder of itinerant bookshop Luminous Books hosted variously by Central Saint Martins, UAL, London Centre for Book Arts, Raven Row, SPACE, and Unit/Pitt Projects Vancouver.

Kay Higgins is an artist, publisher, and cultural worker. Her work has included publications, print works, public inscription, photography, and internet-based projects. Higgins’ exhibitions include: It is difficult to put a painting in the mailbox: Toward new models of artists’ publishing at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver (2018); Charrette Roulette: Language: Kathy Slade, Kay Higgins and Publication Studio Vancouver, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2015); Through a Window, SFU Gallery, Burnaby, BC (2015); We Vancouver: 12 Manifestos For the City, Vancouver Art Gallery (2011); and The Property in Question, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2006). Higgins is a co-founder of both Artspeak Gallery and the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres. She is Executive Director of UNIT/PITT Projects. In 2014 Higgins ran for Vancouver City Council.

Patrick Kiley grew up in the state of Michigan and went to university there. After several post-college years spent working on farms, studying cheesemaking, and mounting exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and the New York Public Library, he took the position of cargo manager for the first and only run of the Vermont Sail Freight Project in 2013. This job found him coordinating the unlikely delivery of maple syrup and oat groats from the Champlain Valley to New York City by way of a flat-bottomed boat built by a rice farmer and polymath yeoman. Since then he has run Publication Studio Hudson, named eponymously after the river and tidal estuary but, to the confusion of some, located in the ex-industrial and riparian city of Troy. Later this year his essay "Artifactual Thoughts: Futurefarmers in the Desert" will be published in the book For Want of a Nail, published by No Place Press.

Libby Leshgold Gallery and READ Books acknowledge that this event is located on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.