Double Book Launch | John O’Brian’s Delirium and Lotta Antonsson’s West Coast / West Coast

ADMISSION
Free

Please join Trapp Projects for the release of John O’Brian’s book Delirium and the Trapp Edition of Lotta Antonsson’s West Coast / West Coast catalogue. Read Antonsson’s catalogue here.

Accompanying the book launch will be an exhibition of 80 photographs from Delirium and select artwork related to Capture’s 2023 Selected Exhibition West Coast / West Coast by Lotta Antonsson.

John O’Brian
Delirium
80 Photographs + Artist book

The press photographs in this exhibition are cast-offs. When newspapers digitalized, many shut down their photo libraries and discarded their holdings of analogue prints. The prints were no longer wanted. Some ended up on e-commerce sites, selling for the price of a Sunday paper, which is where these were found. Because they are detached from their original contexts, the photographs fail to support meaning in any predictable way. Like the corporate and institutional photographs assembled by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel in their 1977 book Evidence, they are homeless. As a group, however, they have something to say about the technological delirium of everyday life, the Faustian bargain struck by modernity in the name of scientific advancement and consumerism. A rocket crumples like cardboard into the ground, men in suits at an auto showroom play in an artificial fish pond, aviation fuel burns out of control beneath a safety sign.

Lotta Antonsson
West Coast / West Coast
5 Photomontage works + Catalogue

The catalogue features a conversation between the curator Patrik Andersson, Lotta Antonsson and John O’Brian.

Lotta Antonsson belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the 1990s, inspired by post-structuralist theory and art exploring new media as it pertains to identity formation. For nearly three decades, her work has questioned the objectification of women with irony and self-distance. At the heart of this project has been her exploration and exploitation of lens-based images disseminated via printed matter. In particular, Antonsson’s work reflects her fascination with the late 1960s and 1970s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolutions.

For her Capture exhibition at Trapp in 2023, Antonsson assembled a collection of images and objects from her studio that functioned as pretext for her research into local archives and the shoreline of Vancouver. The exhibition title, West Coast / West Coast, is a literal reference to the artist’s research sites, but also evokes East Coast / West Coast, the title of a work by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt produced in 1969, just prior to their arrival in Vancouver.

The exhibition will be available for viewing on Saturdays 1-5 April 6 – April 27 (or by appointment).

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