Art Metropole

#12594

The Unexpected

Artist

Emily Smit-Dicks

Writer

Josh Thorpe

Date

2016

Publisher

Swimmers Group

Format

Artists' Books

Size

15 × 20 cm

Length

101 pages

Genre

Illustration, Poetry

Description

Composed only of short prose scenes and sketches in watercolour and ink, The Unexpected tells dozens of stories of new love.

By turns humorous and delicate, nostalgic and blunt, The Unexpected turns away from the clamor of current affairs to tell a story of love in a hundred pages of slowly unfolding scenes in melancholy and joy.

Somewhere between flash fiction, poetry, and picture book, The Unexpected is short and descriptive, rhythmic and melodic, and visits topics as diverse as rain and wind, sumac and pine… and birds that do their business on men and women’s heads.

The images, some quickly scrawled in ink, others more carefully daubed in wash, show us foxes, feet, and streetlights at night. Scenes, it almost seems, from some storyboard of dreams, dreamt at the edge of sleep.

Joshua Thorpe is an artist and writer. His text-based installations (and works in traditional media) have appeared in various galleries and institutions, and he is the author of Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide (Art Metropole) and A Dog at Sea (Beaucagearts Press).

Emily Smit-Dicks is a costumer, designer, and artist working in fabric, collage, sculpture, and illustration. The Unexpected is her first publication.

Swimmers Group is a Toronto-based, international, cross-disciplinary, art and literature publication studio, created in 2015 by Sebastian Frye to produce exciting work in print with both emerging and established artists.

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