Let's Look at the Figures

Solo Exhibiton, February 7 - March 23, 2019
Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto
All photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Founded in 1937, Pelican Books established itself as an important imprint that reached an expansive audience through low-cost intellectual paperbacks. This non-fiction series focused on a range of intellectual subjects – from urban planning to psychology, music, art and mathematics – the imprint was described as an everyman’s library, an autodidact’s university curriculum. By lowering the traditional barriers to knowledge, these books became especially popular among the self-educating post-war generation, providing much of the reading matter for the sexual and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Let’s Look at the Figures draws from the book covers produced in the years spanning 1970 to 1972, a time in which the popularity and quality of the publishing series was on the decline. This was the beginning of a new era of political unrest, economic stagnation, and the slow rise of neoliberalism, pressures that have particular bearing on our current moment of widespread political unease. The works distil, simplify, and reduce the designs into a single object and colour – 140 objects taken from 140 books covers, arranged as a constellation of each year’s thinking.