Office Hours in residence in PLOT, 2018
20 Apr to 2 Jun 2018
OH x SPIT Publication Launch June 2, 2018 at 2:00 PM
Accompanying the exhibition of Brody Albert's Nonlocal will be an installation of Office Hours in Access Gallery's PLOT space for the duration of the exhibition. Operated by Brody Albert and Nathaniel Klein, Office Hours is a nonprofit gallery and publisher initiated in 2013 in LA. Dedicated to the intersection of visual art and creative writing, their mission is to build an active dialogue between literary scenes and arts communities. After being forced out of their Arts District space in 2016, Office Hours took an itinerant position. Office Hours has mounted 9 exhibitions and produced 8 publications featuring the work of 30 LA artists and 19 writers.
In PLOT, Office Hours will feature an omnibus of their publications, along with a new video work titled Open Ocean by Nathaniel Klein, and a new publication by Brody Albert in collaboration with Rachel Paprocki, Miguel Espinoza and Michael Kennedy Costa.
It is a part of PLOT's mission to support a cross-pollination of communities, a sharing of skills and resources, and an investment in the cultivation of conversations that might otherwise remain isolated. In a strategy to engage artist-led literature and publishing communities from these two Pacific coast cities, Access Gallery has invited SPIT—the reconfigured bi-monthly reading series and podcast formerly known as LIT LIT LIT LIT—to lead a series of experimental readings and events engaging with Office Hours' publications and installation; re-interpreting these materials in new and unexpected ways through their close interactions.
Throughout the month of May, Office Hours and SPIT will engage in a long-distance correspondence of images, visual materials and text recorded in a cascading scroll, printed by PLOT's namesake—a large format plotting printer. Additionally, SPIT has invited Vancouver-based artist and writer Sonja Ratkay to lead an intimate two-day workshop inviting participants to generate drawing, writing, and reading experiments; the materials of which will form the basis for a new published work. The experiments will be centered around language, engaging the body through techniques including unreadable writing and text to speech.
Workshop + event details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/176888639637202/
SPIT is a series of reading experiments, workshops, interviews, events and poetic expressions based in Vancouver, and organized by Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Christian Vistan. The online archive of their former self is located at www.lit-lit-lit-lit.com.
Sonja Ratkay is an artist, poet and researcher. Through reliefs filled with poems, diagram drawings and immersive installations she researches topics of language and the body, forming of thoughts through known and unknown symbols, intuition, haunting and the haunted, states of being, and environmental triggers which lead to psychological transformation. She lives and works in Vancouver, BC.