10 years of mail from French artist Bruno Richard
Saturday, January 12, 2008, 1:00-6:00 PM
One day only
at MESS HALL
6932 N. Glenwood Ave.,
Rogers Park, "Morse" Stop on the Red Line EL
www.messhall.org
For this afternoon event Marc Fischer will allow viewers to peruse 10 years of packages sent to him by the French artist Bruno Richard over the course of their long correspondence-based friendship. This collection consists of easily 60 pounds of papers, magazines, photocopied drawings, writings, junk mail, mock ups of publications, CDrs, and whatever else Richard could stuff into an envelope. Materials from these mailings were included last year in the exhibition "Exalted Trash" at Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Art however they were largely kept out of reach under Plexiglass vitrines. For this showing visitors will be able to look at anything they want.
Paris-based artist Bruno Richard (b. 1956) has been publishing books and magazines of transgressive drawings, text, and photo-based work since 1976. Long working under the sarcastically chosen name Elles Sont de Sortie (roughly translated: the girls are going out), Richard collaborated with the late artist Pascal Doury until his death in 2001. Richard continues to work under the E.S.D.S. imprint on his own. His work has been included in Art Spiegelman's seminal comic magazine RAW as well as the RE/Search books "Pranks!" and "'Zines!" Richard's work can be seen online at Doury is Dead (http://users.pandora.be/a141615/home.html) and E.S.D.S. (http://lsont2sortie.free.fr/)
Bruno Richard pokes at taboo subjects from suicide and torture to interracial sex, bodily functions, health problems, violence against women, and the discomfort people feel talking about how much money they make and how they spend it. He makes diaries that include every film he has seen, what medications he is on and other revealing lists. Bruno implicates himself and his own relationships in the margins of many of the scenarios he frequently re-draws from scavenged photos. The work is constantly self-deprecating.
PLEASE NOTE: Bruno Richard's drawings and photo-based works often feature very strong adult content and his mailings sometimes include similarly hard materials from other sources. Nothing will be censored from the packages so consider yourself warned.
About Public Collectors:
Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.
