Sgt Pepper’s Extended Lonely Hearts Club Band presupposes that the actors, musicians, comedians, scientists, politicians and athletes pictured in the Peter Blake collage for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover were actual participants in the recording.

The result of several years of research, the book is a conceptual score for an audio work comprised of a series of photo arrangements depicting ensembles such as Albert Einstein playing violin alongside Marlene Dietrich on the musical saw or Fred Astaire and Shirley Temple tap-dancing a duet, while Marlon Brandon accompanies on bongos. Dyment has arranged over one hundred photographs in musical and visual groupings that recall both early Fluxus scores and the found photography bookworks of Hans-Peter Feldmann.

The work continues Dyment’s interest in seeing sound and in the conflation of high and low culture. Avant-garde tropes are played out, not by Stockhausen or William Burroughs (who both appear) but by sports figures, vaudevillians and starlets. The book is a sound-piece as work of fiction, with latent sound and implied pastiche suggesting musical arrangements. It is not necessary that the score be realized by musicians, though this possibility remains.

Available from Paul + Wendy Projects

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based artist whose work mines pop culture for shared associations and alternate meanings. His practice is not media-specific, and has incorporated video, performance, sculpture, installation, photography, billboards, neon, bookworks, CDs and records.

He has exhibited in Calgary, Dublin, Edmonton, Halifax, Kingston, New York City, Philadelphia, Surrey, Toronto, Vancouver, and Varna, Bulgaria. In 2008 he was the artist in residency at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland, where he created A Drink To Us (When We’re Both Dead). The works consists of an edition of 25 empty wooden caskets and a barrel of whiskey to be buried for 100 years. Last year he created a work involving a crane and 35 disco-balls, for the Lola Festival in London, Ontario.

His work can be seen at www.davedyment.com or heard on the YYZ Anthology Aural Cultures or the Art Metropole disk New Life After Fire, a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Recent publications include the LP  Fifteen Minute Fame (2009) and the artists’ book Pop Quiz (2010). He is represented by MKG127.

Paul + Wendy Projects is a Toronto-based publisher of artists’ editions. Founded in 2005, they have published three bookworks and five silkscreens to date, with artists such as The Royal Art Lodge, Michael Dumontier, Neil Farber, Tucker Nichols, Micah Lexier, and Jason McLean. Several new projects are planned for 2010.