David Osbaldeston, Tales from the Expanded Moment, Private View

Join us for the opening of Tales from the Expanded Moment, a new solo exhibition by David Osbaldeston.

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.

Exhibition continues: 9 October – 10 November 2024
Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm

Current work on our archive is supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.