Book Launch: An Elemental Typology by Randy Lee Cutler

Join us at READ Books for the launch of An Elemental Typology, a limited edition artist book by Randy Lee Cutler.

Taking the scientific grid as a point of departure, An Elemental Typology traces the prolix potential of collapsing scientific, industrial, philosophical, spiritual and informal knowledge practices alongside images from the public domain into new mineralogical arrangements. The fictive inventory draws on real data to generate an archaeological dig across diverse geographies and histories and in the process, renders visible new architectures of time and matter. Working with four distinct and non-hierarchical categories (the songs of science, supernatural oracles, natural philosophy and the underworld), this data mining is stratified for the purposes of condensation, displacement and transformation. Ultimately, these borrowed images and the specific stories they uncover are adapted towards new crystallizations, allowing for an emergent legibility of a world beyond words where matter matters.

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver based writer, artist and educator. In the intersections of gender, art, science, and technology, her practice takes up themes of materiality and sustenance. Randy is a professor at Emily Carr University in the Faculty of Art on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver, Canada.

Randy Lee Cutler, An Elemental Typology, 2019
Limited first edition artist book (150 copies)
62 pages, colour
Designed with Josh Singler, Master of Design (2020).

This project is supported by Emily Carr University and a SSHRC Explore Grant.

This event is being presented as a part of Vancouver Art Book Week, a series of events coinciding with the 2019 Vancouver Art Book Fair.

READ Books respectfully acknowledges that it is situated 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.