Art Metropole

#14697

L'enfant chiffre

Artists

Anna Solal and Olivier Prada

Writer

Catherine Telford Keogh

Price

$25.00

Date

2021

Publisher

Cassandra Cassandra and JMS Press

Format

Artists' Books

Genre

Literary, Collage, Criticism, Drawing

Anna Solal’s works are comprised of discarded objects, found and dismantled to be stitched together anew. Her sculptures utilize consumer goods, vernacular materials found and sourced in local and informal circuits. She transforms ambivalent dollar-store and streetwear objects into sublimated reliquaries. Her work often includes figurative drawings that reference collective imagination and metaphysical compositions of everyday life. Solal weaves together pop and survivalist features, making mysterious objects that speak to the nature of existence.

The artists’ book L’enfant chiffre was produced with Olivier Prada. Prada is a sound-artist and writer whose practice fixates on cinematic and literary noise and abstraction. Written collaboratively, the poetic prose tells the story of a child whose body grows in the form of a number, increasing as time passes. His transformation and relation to the world are observed while navigating the concept of social organization in a mystical nature. Throughout the story, the text converses with India ink drawings and photo collages that express the main character’s physical and mental states. The exploration of self reaches the limits of reality and stretches to depths of virtual fantasy.

The book ends with a piece of ficto-criticism by Catherine Telford Keogh, written as an afterword responding to Solal’s practice. Her piece slips from a didactic style to one that employs biting sarcasm toward corporate capitalist culture and its sexist trappings, which thrive in the extreme neglect of ecology and public health.

Produced in partnership with the Toronto Cultural Office of the French Embassy in Canada, and with the support of the French Institute in Paris.