Exhibitions / Shelved
10.11.2005 to 03.12.2005
Shelved: an attempt to organize the artistic multiple personality disorder that had defined Bond's practice over the preceding five years. Within each painted book wriggle two opposing worms, slippery things that attempted to unify two overriding (and antithetical) obsessions – the decay of High Modernism, and the allure of fiction. Each of these fictional painted books represented the fall of formalism in miniature, with Bond as its author. He used predominantly abstract designs that recalled paperback book cover designs of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, which each drew on the history of twentieth century abstract or formalist painting as source material. The downbeat titles that Bond created for each book echo their withered and cracked state, while they pessimistically track the daily struggle artists undergo in order to continue to maintain their practices. In addition, the painted fiction is upheld with a range of historically appropriate fictional publishing house logos and ISBN numbers.
