Perimeter Editions x Patrick Pound | Melbourne Book Launch
Join us for the launch of Patrick Pound – Windows (Perimeter Editions 093), the New Zealand-born, Australian-based artist's first photobook with Perimeter Editions. Taking place on Saturday July 20, 3pm–5pm at Perimeter Books (734 High St, Thornbury), the launch will feature a panel discussion between Patrick Pound, Daniel Palmer, Angela Connor, and Paul Mylecharane, with signing by the artist and light celebratory refreshments to follow. All are welcome – we hope to see you there!
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter Books
734 High St, Thornbury VIC
Saturday July 20, 2024
From 3pm–5pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
SPEAKERS
PATRICK POUND’s work explores the art of collecting and the ways in which ‘things’ and the relationship between them can create a new logic for the viewer to decipher. Pound draws on his vast archives of images and objects, for their associative possibilities, making complex arrangements and installations.
DANIEL PALMER is a Professor in the School of Art at RMIT University, known for his writing on photography, digital media and contemporary art. His books include Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want, edited with Grace McQuilten (Intellect, 2023); Installation View: Photography exhibitions in Australia 1848–2020 (Perimeter Editions, 2021) with Martyn Jolly; and Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to Crowdsourcing (Bloomsbury, 2017).
ANGELA CONNOR is Senior Curator at MAPh, where she delivers an ambitious exhibition programme and selects from an extensive archived collection focused on Australian image making. From 2017–21 she worked as Studio Manager to Robert Owen, and was editor of his monograph A Book of Encounters (Perimeter Editions), launched in 2021 at Heide Museum of Modern Art.
PAUL MYLECHARANE is a graphic designer and programmer whose practice focuses mainly on the intersection of physical and digital publishing and its relationship to the archive. He works collaboratively under the name Common Room with people and organisations doing for and not-for-profit work in the arts, culture and education.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Patrick Pound collects photographs as if on a dare. For thirty years, the New Zealand-born, Australian artist has been collecting other people’s photographs and placing them in his own peculiar categories. To photograph the world is to collect it in the form of images. Pound’s work seems to propose: ‘If only we could find all the pieces, we might solve the puzzle.’ It is a folly, of course.
In Windows, Pound’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions, we find a cross-section of images lifted from a single category in Pound’s vast collection of 70,000 photographs. Each of the ‘found’ photographs in this new book features a window seen from the outside. We are allowed to look through them, from the privacy of our own homes. We see ghostly figures and happy families; we see actors acting, and everyday folks acting up; we see real and imagined worlds. Every scene is one of a kind. Page after page, we look through other people’s photographs and other people’s windows. Here, Pound reminds us that the photograph is a window posing as a mirror. Surprisingly, through its single constraint, Windows offers a little history of photography – its evolving material qualities and its practical and expressive uses.
Pound finds almost all of his photographs – discarded amateur snaps and photographic prints from now-defunct picture libraries, newspaper and cinema archives – for sale on eBay and other online platforms. He calls the internet a vast, unhinged album, and for years he has spent countless hours sorting through the morass, finding or inventing connections. The recently redundant images that feature in this book extend beyond the nostalgic or sentimental; they speak to us directly about our present. Photographs that have been taken from their context, and which have lost their initial reason for ‘living’, are remarkably pliable little signs.
In 2023, these photographs – and this book – remind us of anything from the nuances of human interconnection to the separation of domestic dwellings, with the offering of sanctuary and entrapment nestled together. These images have lost their utility, only to find another more important one. Just when we thought they were past their use-by date, we are pressed to think again.
Windows is a book of photographs worth looking through. It is a sampler of life as it is, was, and might be lived.
112 pages, 20 x 28 cm, OTA-bind, softcover, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).