Liam Crockard
Reader 3, 4, and 5
August 6 – September 9, 2017
Opening reception: Sunday, August 6, 5-8PM
Documentation by: Lydia Glenn-Murray, Sean MacAlister, and Keith J. Varadi
Reader 5, 39:06, 2017
Reader 3, 4, and 5 is a continuation/mutation of an ongoing project of the same name. Initially conceived as a kind of ode to academic course readers, this iteration of Reader considers three possible analogs for the artist book in consideration of the history of self-publishing, DIY projects & alternative spaces, garden gnomes, strange hobbies, modern hermits, print worker’s rights, punk flyers, may 1968, rat bikes, and film-as-plastic, among other topics.
Reader 3 takes the form of a hefty, wordless catalogue of xerox collage that has served as the preliminary work for the Closed Shop series over the last several years. The resulting book is a tome of mishmashed counter-cultural and agit-prop poster works from the '68 student riots to the '86 print-workers strike. The work stands alone as an object, but also functions as a kind of didactic for the as-yet-unfinished and unseen series.
Reader 4 exists as a running video loop consisting of a handful of short, disparate pieces of found footage culled from different formats and eras. This material is then separated into frames, and these frames are laid out in a document and run through a photocopier. The resulting frames are then reassembled into their original format. For a short period of time these vignettes exist as stripped down sequential narratives — large thousand-frame book-works — before being wrestled back into a language of film.
Reader 5 (available as a podcast) is intended as a wandering set of footnotes for Readers 3 and 4. The resulting sound-collage of narrators (‘readers’), pirate radio, and music provides a kind of primary text to accompany the other components of the show while also expanding the possible terms for its engagement.
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Since graduating from OCADU in 2010, Liam Crockard has been building a multifaceted career of sculpture, collage and photography works examining the nature of work itself, with a particular emphasis on “jerry-rigging” and improvisation as both a symptom and a strategy for art-making and survival alike. He has had solo and group exhibitions at Cooper Cole, Clint Roenisch, MKG127, Roberta Pelan, and internationally at Gestalten Space Berlin, West Cork Arts in Ireland, Scott Projects in Chicago and was recently a featured artist at the 2017 Material Art Fair in Mexico City. His work has been reviewed and published in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Elephant Magazine and the Toronto Star. He is currently co-director of The Loon artist’s space in Toronto.