Julian Jason Haladyn and Janice Gurney
A History of Tea Spills

What am I looking at? Blue continents with coastal islands, or blue islands with smaller islands trailing from their coastlines; blue lakes; blue, non-bilateral Rorschach tests. What is the correct scale? There are captions to read. The words Julian has written identify the shapes as spilled tea. Yet the spills are not tea-coloured. They have been transformed into a brilliant “Yves Klein Blue.” Like the monochromes in Klein’s book, Yves: Peintures, published in 1954, each image of a tea spill is labelled with the name of the city and a date. We know where the tea was spilled and the year in which this took place. Yet the images are not presented chronologically. The events that they document do not proceed or follow each other logically, according to their dates: Georgetown 2008 proceeds Plainsfield 2002; Nice 1997 follows London 2012; Brisbane 2010 comes before Elora 2008. The dates are reliable but their sequence is disturbed. Is this an important period in the history of tea spills?

Published by Blue Medium Press
12×12 inches, 24 pp, full colour POD, perfectbound hardcover, 2013
Edition of 49
122CAD

Available from: http://www.bluempress.ca/ArtistBooks.htm

Julian Jason Haladyn is a Canadian writer and artist. He is the author of Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (Afterall Books, 2010), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on art and visual theory. With Miriam Jordan-Haladyn he co-authored The Films and Videos of Jamelie Hassan. As an artist he has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including in the traveling exhibitions Oh, So Iroquois and Titles.
Janice Gurney was born in Winnipeg, and currently lives in Toronto. She has been exhibiting her artworks since the late 1970s, with solo exhibitions in Canada and the United States. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally, and is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, McIntosh Gallery (Western University), University of Toronto, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Museum London, and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Blue Medium Press is an independent Canadian press founded in 2001 by Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn. Its mandate is to publish books, catalogues and other printed materials that promote an active cultural dialogue, focusing on writing that engages with visual arts, culture and theory.

Publisher’s website: http://www.bluempress.ca/ArtistBooks.htm

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