LETTRES/LETTERS features the works of eleven artists that explore the book and text through various lenses by dealing materially or conceptually with notions such as the relation between text and image, the printed matter, narration and the book as object.       LETTRES/LETTERS integrates these artworks as such, rather than presenting them through documentation, and hence functions as a printed exhibition. By doing so, it asserts the need to rethink the established paradigm of going to a space in order to experience artworks. Resulting from the research of new means to disseminate contemporary art, this book attempts to overwrite delineations between disciplines and establish connections between isolated milieus.

The artists were invited to think the book as a place, a medium, a concept for creative production. LETTRES/LETTERS presents their ideas in a publication situated somewhere between an artist’s book and a critical and documentary work. Their projects inhabit the book, referring to it or adopting one or another of its countless manifestations – from philosophical tome to zine. Taking advantage of an object generally considered structured, nomadic, lasting and legitimate, they appropriate, revise, deconstruct, alter, and acknowledge it; yet they also are in dialogue with one another.

Available from MAAM, via www.mille-feuilles.ca/lettresletters

At the start, MAAM is two people: Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte and Anne-Marie Proulx. Mariane is in Vancouver, Anne-Marie is in Montreal. They work together to encourage and facilitate the creation of artists’ books in which works appear as such, complete, as opposed to being shown fragmented in the form of documentation. They believe that the distance existing between people generates a space that fosters creation.
MAAM wants to bring together the work of artists from different disciplines and milieus, so that these may connect, inform and complete one another. In the process of concretizing projects, the printed medium not only serves as a support, but also adopts a significant role in the creation of artists’ works and in their combination. MAAM wants to initiate the meeting of ideas and creative intents so as to allow for a reflection combining multiple voices.
MAAM aspires to build a creative chain, in which the one will influence the other, the former will incite the latter, and so on. From this will result a community of artists who, without necessarily working together, will nevertheless be influenced by one another.
Amidst the pages and sheets where images and texts are laid out, MAAM wants to leave open blank spaces, interstices in which you are invited to enter and speculate on your own terms.