1] As a left-handed child and ADD avant la lettre, I could not keep my numbers straight. Columns of figures drifted around the pages of my grade school work book, rows bleeding into one another, making calculations difficult. The teacher suggested that I draw a box around each arithmetic exercise in order to keep things separated and legible. Years later this boxing, a framing or delineation of the subject, became central to my painting and drawing practice.
2] In 1981, I photographed the pages of my first-grade arithmetic work book, composed in the fall of 1962. My intent was to produce a facsimile of this juvenilia as an artist’s book. For all the usual reasons, the project was shelved.
3] In 2002, all the subjects listed on the spines of the 23-volume, 1962 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica were typed out on an electric typewriter in such a way as to imitate the boxing or framing found in my 1962 numbers work book. This concrete poem was read aloud on stage, but never actually published.
4] In 2013, I finally published the two works as a single artist’s book whose title, [1962/1981/2002/2013], recounts the chronology of its coming into being.

More info: http://soundcloud.com/paul-collins and http://www.johnandpaul.ca/

Before moving to Paris in 1982, Paul Collins lived in Toronto, where he studied Fine Arts at York University and at the New School of Art. He worked at the Coach House Press; exhibited his paintings and photographs at A Space, YYZ, Mercer Union; played music in the Cabana Room of the Spadina Hotel; contributed to Only Paper Today and co-founded Permanent Press. Since living in Paris, he has exhibited and performed at La Fondation Cartier, CREDAC, Le Musée des Beaux-arts de Mulhouse, La Galerie Bernard Jordan, L’Impasse, La Générale, Le Commissariat and 64. Collins’s feature-length video, 24 Hour 3 Stooges, premiered in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. In 2008, he co-authored MAL ARME (Letter Drop 3), with poet Victor Coleman (BookThug, Toronto). With collaborator John Armstrong, he recently showed at MoCCA, Toronto, as part of Contact 2010. www.johnandpaul.ca. Collins’ photographs were recently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as part of the exhibition, “Canadian Art in the 1960s & 1970s Through the Lens of The Coach House Press. ” He teaches intermedia practice and experimental music at the Ecole Supérieure d’arts et media de Caen. He is represented by General Hardware Contemporary, Toronto. His books and records can be found at Florence Loewy Book by Artists, Paris, and Art Metropole, Toronto.

Care Not Care was founded in 2013 primarily as a record label for experimental music. The publishing of artists’ books and ephemera is a side project that we hope to see grow. Our recording artists include P_LAB, Palix, Kasper T. Toeplitz, Ultradig and Paul Collins.

Publisher’s website: https://www.facebook.com/care.notcare