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Matt Connors

Gay Areas Telephone Directory

Regular price $52.50

Details

Gay Areas Telephone Directory is an artifact from another age. It is an exact facsimile of an American telephone directory published in December 1983 by Gay International Inc. and targeted at queer population. The phonebook is a now-obsolete format, but before mobile phones and the internet every household had one by the landline. This queer directory featured listings and advertisements for businesses friendly towards or catering to lesbians and gay men at a time when such visibility was a rare and possibly dangerous thing. 1983 was a watershed year for LGBTQ people. The first HIV/AIDS cases were reported barely two years before, marking the beginning of a health crisis that would go on to kill more than half a million (primarily LGBTQ) people within the next ten years. In addition to serving as a portrait of a community and its culture at a crucial stafe of development, Gay Areas Telephone Directory stands as a time capsule of lost generation(s) felled by AIDS.

Originally published in 1983 by Gay International Inc.

Size: 10.25 x 8.25 inches 

Pages: 300

Facsimile edition published by Pre-Echo 2017.

Softcover, 2017

Pre-Echo Publishing is established by artist Matt Connors

Matt Connors

Matt Connors is a painter who creates impactful visual compositions, with a sustained interest in form and colour. His work draws upon the history of painting and processes, particularly minimalism and abstraction, but is also influenced by design, poetry, writing and music. While his visual vocabulary is often borrowed from the modernist canon—colours, gestures, grids, framing devices and other geometric compositions—Connors’ approach is resolutely contemporary in both method and conception. In terms of colouration, his work triggers intuitive responses through complex and playful palettes. The viewer cannot resolve Connors’ compositional riddles through traditional formalist discourses—his work opens up a range of intellectual questions concerning mimesis, iteration and simulacra. Connors often works in series of interlinked, yet wholly autonomous works, in which a dialogue is established between repetition and variations in colours and form. Although his paintings might appear to depict something ‘real’—a familiar work of art for example—there is, in fact, no ‘original’. Taken to the logical conclusion, Connors’ paintings could be viewed as having superseded the reality upon which they are based. Matt Connors is also active in publishing artist books and other titles.

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