Art Metropole

14 May 2004

Book launch for Joey Dubuc's Neither Either Nor Or

Publisher

Conundrum Press

Artist

Joey Dubuc

Time

7 pm - 9 pm

Art Metropole in collaboration with Conundrum Press hosted the Toronto launch of Neither Either Nor Or by Joey Dubuc! An enthusiastic crowd enjoyed Dubuc’s audience driven reading with accompanying slide images.

Inspired by Edward Packard’s Choose Your Own Adventure Books, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, artist Joey Dubuc has created the genre-defying literary debut Neither Either Nor Or. Follow along while trying to avoid the pitfalls of his winding narrative as it leads (or loses) you through caverns, forests, rivers, or along a cliff¹s edge. At surface what seems to be a simple rumination on death becomes a metaphysical quest guided by existential choices, glimpsed through the lens of nostalgia.

From the layout to the typeface to the illustrations, this is a flawless evocation of the golden age of 1980s young adult literature… Being one who is rarely nostalgic the design of this book, with its Todd Haynes intensity and aesthetic referencing, consumed me like a virus. Taking a lowbrow form of literature, and a very specific one at that, and using it to expand the limits of what a book can be is no cheap trick. More a disorientation generator than a story, it fulfills the promise of adventure, albiet with a ruckus filled with existential crisis after crisis. – Broken Pencil

Art Metropole would like to thank Andy from Conundrum Press and Joey for their good humour and enthusiasm. It was a pleasure to host this event!

Conundrum Press is a book publishing company located in Montreal, Canada, founded in 1995 by Andy Brown.

Conundrum is renowned in Canadian publishing for its innovative, wide-ranging, often genre-defying, books of fiction, cultural history, graphic novels, spoken word and artist projects.[citation needed] Conundrum authors include Dana Bath, Marc Bell, Elisabeth Belliveau, Lance Blomgren, Shary Boyle, Howard Chackowicz, Joey Dubuc, Golda Fried, Corey Frost, Philippe Girard, Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, Liane Keightley, Catherine Kidd, Suki Lee, Amanda Marchand, Billy Mavreas, Chandra Mayor, Maya Merrick, Nathaniel G. Moore, Marc Ngui, Stéphane Olivier, Joe Ollmann, Meg Sircom, Victoria Stanton, Julia Tausch, Marc Tessier, Vincent Tinguely.

The release of Catherine Kidd’s early works, such as everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy in 1996, brought a “modest” amount of publicity for the company, allowing them to expand and publish more of Kidd’s works and works from other authors.

In 2006, for the ten-year anniversary of the company, Brown commissioned “new work from all the people he has published through the decade to include in a lovely, fuchsia-covered, juicy little book called The Portable Conundrum.” The release of the anthology included a large party with all of the contributing authors attending and special readings from the authors’ individual works.

Images

2: Dubuc reading from Neither Either Nor Or.
3: The crowd gives their full attention to the author - ready to shout out choices as needed.
4: Dubuc signing for a happy fan.

1. 
2. 
3. 
4.