Taking Kathy Barry's Midway as a starting point, poet and art-writer Gregory O'Brien will explore and celebrate the potentialities of the artist's book as a medium on its own terms. An ideal forum for collaborative work, the artist's book is capable of altering accustomed relationships between word, image and design. O'Brien will look at Midway alongside other notable book-productions both from New Zealand and abroad.
Midway brings to exhibition one of twelve handmade artist-books that have been produced in collaboration between American poet John Yau, and local visual artist Kathy Barry and is on at Objectspace until November 19. Commissioned by bookmaker Gervais Jassaud for his ongoing Collectif Génération project, Midway is one of the most recent iterations of the Colectif Génération mission; to bring artists and writers from different parts of the world into conversation, so that they might work and think together in the arena of material production.
Gregory O’Brien is a poet, painter and writer. His most recent books include A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (AUP, 2011) Beauties of the Octagonal Pool (AUP, 2012), Whale Years (AUP, 2015) and See What I Can See: New Zealand Photography for the Young and Curious ( AUP, 2015)