Events
Browse

Sunny Nestler + Liz Knox | Unpacking My Bookshelf

This event is in the past
Img 8918
by Sunny Nestler
"Undergrowth," 2018

An exhibition exploring bookmaking practices that employ repetition and endurance, on view in the Faculty Gallery

When

Add to Calendar: iCal Google

Faculty Gallery, 1st Floor

Opening Reception | Friday, October 19, 4-6pm

Unpacking My Bookshelf brings together works by Sunny Nestler and Liz Knox. The artists have long standing bookmaking practices that employ repetition and endurance. The exhibition title alludes to Benjamins essay Unpacking My Library, a text about book collecting and the relationship between a collector and their collections, order and disorder, use-value and fate.

Sunny regularly engages ideas around mutation and replication with a humourous tongue-in-cheek approach to details from desert landscapes. Unpacking My Bookshelf includes works from their newest book Undergrowth, Glow Worm Habitats, Coneworms Growing, and Glow Worm Paragraph. In these works, everyday objects multiply, grow off of one another and make funny object jokes. Don't worry, as a non-object you will still understand when a joke is occurring.

Liz collects text from web-based platforms, often user-generated sources. Unpacking My Bookshelf includes her book Missed Connections, Synopses drawings and a poster project Bataille You Scoundrel. Using Craigslist missed connections from Occupy Wall Street, IMDB content advisories for classic films and a repurposed alphabet, these works mine found text to generate wry portraits. Sunny and Liz tend towards endurance based works that are built on an idiosyncratic logic. Details are put under the microscope and examined again and again and again.

The exhibition is located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral xmky"m (Musqueam), Swxw7mesh xwumixw (Squamish), and sl"ilw"ta" (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.

Sunny Nestler received an MFA from ECUAD in 2013 and has taught here since 2012, including drawing and science classes. Sunny has published work as an illustrator and book/zine maker, and exhibited in the US and Canada. Sunny's work is based in drawing and studies mechanisms of biological life using a process that mimics DNA replication and mutation. Their work also embodies connections between biological processes and DIY communities and sometimes takes the forms of video, installation, performance, or painting. Sunny is one of the founders of the Tempe Zine Fest (2010) and a contributor to the first Underground Publishers Convention (Phoenix, AZ, 2009) and regularly participates in zine and book fairs, as well as organizing community events.

Liz Knox uses conceptual strategies, examining systems of interpretation with an emphasis on irony. Language is the most common thread in her work, and a common starting point is found text. Much of her work exists as artists books, large wall-text installations, videos, and drawings. Her practice involves intensive periods of research which usually result in book or video projects. Her 5th book is forthcoming in Spring 2019, ask her to see a sample offprint if you are at VABF 2018. Liz studied Studio Art at the University of Guelph and received her MFA at ECU in 2013. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals across Canada including Paved Arts, Saskatoon; Vtape, Toronto; Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Winnipeg; Cold Cuts Film Festival, Dawson CIty; and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto.