PLP Exhibition Dates

I am thrilled to announce the first confirmed tour dates for the Portable Library Project!

July 2009
lowercase gallery and reading room
at the Regional Assembly of Text
3934 Main Street
Vancouver, BC
Opening: Saturday, July 4th. 4pm

October 2009
Roberts Street Social Centre/Anchor Archive
5684 Roberts Street
Halifax, NS
Opening: TBA

I will be traveling with portable libraries in tow to Vancouver to mount the first exhibition in July. Wow! For more on the lowercase reading room and the Regional Assembly of Text, read on, or check out their blog and website.

"The lowercase reading room, “one of the richest collections of unusual zines and artist-made books in the country,” is located at 3934 Main Street in Vancouver, BC. Assembled from the combined collections of Jo Cook, Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk, the reading room houses over 500 books in a 9′ x 3′ space at the Regional Assembly of Text, a gift store of hand-made textual oddities. Open seven days a week from noon until 5 pm, the reading room provides a quiet place to read or research the endless possibilities for self-publishing. There are full-colour comics, photocopied grocery lists, zines about personal obsessions and enthusiasms. There are pamphlets and manifestos, the rude and crude and X-rated, alongside lovingly handstitched books with fur-lined covers. An afternoon of browsing may uncover books about holidays from hell, brochures about the end of the world, a survey zine about New Year’s resolutions and a quiz about toast.

"The first systematic defence of one’s right to self-publish was written by John Milton in his Areopagitica in 1644. Milton argued that the survival of an ideology-based state hinges on its tight control of ideas and that state control is impossible to challenge unless self-publishing is allowed. Whether or not the authors of the books in the lowercase reading room collection have read Milton, they share the impulse to create works without censorship. The self-publisher has a dream: she sees the world and its variety of creatures and inventions, she hears the many forms of speech and sees its written symbols, she is not afraid of inconsistencies. She welcomes accidents and the beauty of human imperfection that is edited out by homogeneous ideologies."