Art Metropole

#12942

Mondo Trasho

Date

2016

Publisher

As We Try & Sleep Press

Format

Artists' Books

Size

8.5 × 11 × 0.2 in

Length

128 pp

Genre

Canadian, Music, Performance Art

Description

From the personal archives of Suzanne Gillies and Douglas Sigurdson

Edited by Kegan McFadden

Suzanne Gillies and Douglas Sigurdson were the co-founders / original staff of Plug In Inc., the famed alternative gallery space formed in Winnipeg in 1972. The two fled Winnipeg for loftier prospects in Toronto at the end of the decade. Now, some forty years after their initial engagement with the scene, they have revisited their personal archive from the time: correspondence from friends abroad and not so far
away; greeting cards; receipts; slides; photographs; scraps of paper, the list goes on. A significant part of this cache of material includes the photo documentation and related ephemera from the pop-up punk performance “band” — Mondo Trasho.

For the first time since their one and only performance in November of 1978, the material stemming from their endurance performance is available through an artist book released by As We Try & Sleep Press. At 128 pages, this magazine includes photographs from rehearsals and publicity photo shoots, as well as the live performance, reproduced alongside lyric sheets, the set list, posters, and press clippings. Gillies and Sigurdson have contributed a foreword recalling their approach to the performance of posing as a punk band, in which they clarify (using the lens of their contemporaries, General Idea) that — “We wanted to be a band and we knew that if we looked like a band and acted like a band, we could say that we were a band and we would be.”

About the Editor:

Kegan McFadden’s projects, which take the shape of publications, exhibitions, performances, and artworks, embody a theory of thinking through history. He animates his archival research with an emphasis on the anecdotal, and is particularly interested in locating networks of activity that have gone unacknowledged.

About the Press:

Established in 2002, As We Try & Sleep Press explores the overlapping points between the literary and visual arts on a project basis. Previous publications range from poetry chapbooks to comic books, flipbooks, broadsheets, photo albums, travelogues, serial mail outs, and children’s tales.

Softcover, perfect-bound, b&w and colour.

ISBN 978-0-9953443-0-3

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