Art Metropole

#16907

The Purpose of the Pictures: Drawings by Jubal Brown

Artist

Jubal Brown

Writers

Tasman Richardson and Luis Jacob

Pseudonym Press

Price

$56.00

Date

2026

Publisher

Pseudonym Press

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-0674598-0-2

Size

21 × 26 cm

Length

96 pp

Genre

Drawing, Contemporary Art, Canadian, Politics

Description

Jubal Brown invokes the shock and awe of the contemporary media landscape with pen and ink drawings. His naive re-creations of image and text illuminate existential dread in the time of doomscrolling, social media and hyper-reality. Using pop culture references, slogans, logos, cartoons and celebrities, cinema and literature, spiritual icons and cultural detritus The Purpose of The Pictures addresses the contemporary crises of identity, isolation and alienation in ways that are at once darkly humorous and tragically comic. Beneath it all runs a persistent current of human mortality.

The drawings were made during periods of hospitalization, when Brown set aside his laptop in favour of pen and paper. In an irony worth noting, Brown is best known for his 1996 intervention that made international news when he vomited primary colours onto paintings as they hung on the walls of prominent Museums, MoMA in NYC and AGO in Toronto. In 2015, Brown nearly died vomiting blood when he was hospitalized for multiple organ failure. While recovering drawing became a way to reflect on the vulnerability which haunts us all. The late writer R.M. Vaughan called him “the Dark Prince of Toronto art”, this book suggests something more nuanced and complex.

The book itself is a considered objet d’art. Sage-green hardcover with a gold foil stamp opens onto 96 pages of black ink on 5.0pt Groundwood Book White newsprint, the elevated exterior giving way to the raw D.I.Y. of the interior reflects the contradictory tension of the drawings. Introductory essays by publisher Tasman Richardson and artist Luis Jacob provide critical context. Published in an edition of 300 copies.

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