July 8 – August 19

Opening Saturday, July 8, 2-5 PM

MKG127 is excited to present Bibliography, a group exhibition including new and existing works by gallery artists including:

Dean Baldwin Lew, Alan Belcher, Adam David Brown, Bill Burns, Michael Dumontier, Dave Dyment, Liza Eurich, Sara Graham, Instant Coffee, Laura Kikauka, Kristiina Lahde, Jason Lujan, Gwen MacGregor, John Marriott, Luke Parnell, Roula Partheniou, Geoffrey Pugen, Jayce Salloum, Monica Tap, Joy Walker, and Laurel Woodcock

The format of the book has proved remarkably resilient in the face of breakthroughs in other technologies. Its early demise has been predicted continually – with the advent of cinema, television, the personal computer and the e-book reader. Even the phonograph was once cause for alarm, as evidenced in Octave Uzanne’s short story from 1894, The End of Books:

“If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.”

Bibliophiles needn’t have worried. While the death knell rang throughout the last century-plus, the codex held steady. Today physical books still outsell their electronic counterparts four-to-one. Sixty-eight percent of readers between the age of 18 and 29 prefer printed volumes, suggesting the trend is not drifting downward.

This exhibition celebrates the multi-faceted form of the book with a wide array of treatments, from foregrounding text, typography, the page, the title, or the cover, to using the form of the book as context for content.

MKG127 is located in Tkaronto, on the sacred land and home to many Indigenous nations. The territories of the Huron-Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations hold space for the daily activities of every settler that resides in the meeting place of Tkaronto.

This territory exists in connection to the One Dish, One Spoon Wampum belt, a peace treaty dating back to before the 18th century which is a mutual agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to share and care for the land and the resources around the Great Lakes; the dish representing the land itself and the spoon representing responsibility in sharing its resources. As a gallery operating on this land, this informs our desire to support our represented artists, and recognize the context we operate within.