Tales from the Expanded Moment is an archival presentation of new and existing books produced by David Osbaldeston over the last two decades.
The exhibition is not intended as a survey, but ‘a reflection on how books might be conceived as ‘flat sculpture’ or simply as a compressed form to convey a porous relationship between the studio and the world outside.’ In the eyes of the artist, it is also a continuous and constantly changing dialogue, linked by the shared element of the artist’s own faux Enlightenment typeface, Mock Modernica. Where Enlightenment fonts carry gravitas drawn from traditional engraved letters and lead type, the artist's hand-drawn design mocks the authority of printed language.
Artist’s books are able to transcend the physical boundaries of the gallery space and simultaneously inhabit multiple lives elsewhere. Somewhat paradoxically the book works on display here find themselves displayed in a vitrine in the Outset Archive at Matt’s Gallery.
The Matt’s Gallery Archive is a space charged with artefacts from other times and locations where experimental directions the gallery has supported, embodied or sometimes abandoned are preserved for posterity, rediscovery and reinterpretation.
In this context, through one lens, the presentation of works could be seen as a response to the legacies of conceptualism and the artist as publisher. Through another, in a bid to evade simple categorisation, it is a timeline of the dogged pursuit of an arch-collagist at work; One who draws directly upon images and words and their visual characteristics found in historical print, painting, and sculpture to examine familiar tropes, power relationships, or ideologies in the re-representation of actual or imagined identities.
In response to the question ‘why publish?’ in 2005, the artist stated:
1. To engage more fully with the notion of authorship as a flexible form in relation to the reconstruction of truth through fictional form and non-fictional subject.
2. To explore the appropriation of low tech and achievable literary forms to explore how semiotic application of such forms can begin to be employed toward singular creative ends which may potentially disturb their reading.
3. To begin to explore how the variable conditions of receivership (as unsolicited / solicited posted item, picked up in the gallery, passed on etc) may potentially alter the reading of such work. The context of the artwork’s receivership should be flexible and inhabit existing structures.
4. By exploring the above, to build upon research which had begun to draw upon early literary forms together with their attendant strategies of social and/or artistic engagement, implications and contexts.
5. To find out what happens.
Current work on our archive is supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.
