Opening Reception: May 16, 2019 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Los Angeles, CA. (May 7, 2019) Tim Youd’s typewriter-ribbon themed “Drawings of a Painting” opens at there-there (4859 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029). Youd is renowned for his ongoing 100 Novels retyping series, the subject of multiple solo museum shows. The Opening and artist reception will be held on Thursday, May 16 from 6 – 8pm.
Consider the typewriter ribbon: Half an inch wide, made of cotton, made of nylon. Saturated with ink. Red and black. Solid black. Or blue, as Raymond Chandler preferred. The typewriter ribbon recalls noisy newsrooms and clattering typing pools. Sit at a typewriter all day, and you will come away grimy and ink stained. A fresh spool of typewriter ribbon holds the promise of a novel waiting to be written. Maybe the Great American Novel itself. A used spool holds a secret history of words written and rewritten and rewritten again.
Tim Youd’s colored pencil and graphite drawings bear down on the typewriter ribbon as both an idea and an object. As abstractions, these drawings are hard-edged images of rectangles within rectangles. But as representations, they are exactly typewriter ribbons, complete with grime and smudge. The rectangle within the rectangle format echoes the page of a book—the rectangle of the block of text inside the larger rectangle of the page. The typewriter ribbon doubles symbolically as a sentence.
This group of works—which Youd calls “Drawings of a Painting” – is a translation of the artist’s ongoing series of “Typewriter Ribbon Paintings.” Those “Typewriter Ribbon Paintings,” which first premiered at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2015, are made of typewriter ribbon and residue ink. The drawings, by comparison, have no ribbon or ink in them, but Youd constructs them in the same manner as he constructs the paintings—ribbon by ribbon. The artist positions each drawing closer to the bottom margin of the page than to the top, reinforcing the idea that the image is of an object—one of his paintings—as opposed to a perfectly centered two-dimensional design.
The focus on the typewriter ribbon comes from Youd’s decade-plus performance cycle The 100 Novels Project, in which he has undertaken the retyping of 100 novels, each on the same make/model as used by the author, and in a location related to the novel. To date he has retyped 61 novels.
Lauri Firstenberg first curated Tim Youd into her 2014 LAXART Ball of the Artists at Greystone Mansion in Los Angeles where Youd retyped Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! , Youd’s 28th typed novel, over a three week period.
Youd will begin retyping his 62nd novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on Tuesday, May 21, 2019 in Yuma, Arizona, on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. McCarthy sets the novel’s bloody climax at the Yuma Crossing. This is the first of the six performances Youd will do with MOCA Tucson, leading up to his solo show there in the fall of 2020.
About Tim Youd
A performance and visual artist, Tim Youd is presently engaged in the retyping of 100 novels over a ten-year period. To date, he has retyped 61 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. His work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the CAM St. Louis, MCA San Diego, New Orleans Museum of Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. He has been in residence at various historic writer’s homes, including William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak (Oxford, MS), Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia (Milledgeville, GA), the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House (Piggott, AR), the National Steinbeck Center (Salinas), and Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House (Rodmell, Sussex). He has presented and performed his 100 Novels Project at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), LAXART and the Museo dell’Ara Pacis (Rome), and retyped Joe Orton’s Collected Plays at The Queen’s Theatre with MOCA London. He is represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York. Youd lives and works in Los Angeles.
