Overview
Acknowledging the substantial history of text in art, Paper-jams looks sideways from that legacy to foreground those artists who address the page as a physical and political context rather than focusing on the content of the words contained within.
In an age of online information and electronic tablets, the threatened extinction of the conventional book brings renewed poignancy to the physical structures and systems that have supported publishing since the invention of the codex and the printing press. These works challenge the materiality of the page and the creative potential of its limitations. For the artists, paper is a surface to excavate, to break through the conventional ways we absorb and present information.
Artists include Gretchen Albrecht, Bruce Andrews, Billy Apple and Wystan Curnow, Dan Arps, Elliot Collins, Fiona Connor, Lyell Cresswell, Paul Cullen, Philip Dadson, Johanna Drucker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Marco Fusinato, Tony Green, Robert Grenier, Fiona Jack, Tessa Laird, Alan Loney, Peter Madden, Allan McDonald, Teri Moon, Patrick Pound, Ed Ruscha, Katrina Van Roon and Ivan Zagni.