David Shrigley, Billy Childish, Harry Hill, Magda Archer, Robert Casselton Clark, Laurence Lane, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Jane Chavez-Dawson, Monica Biagioli, Brian Reed, Lisa Slominski, Mr&Mrs, Andrew Bracey, Lee Machell, Paul Cordwell, Richard Healy, Nick Jordan, John Hyatt, Naomi Kashiwagi, Bren O’Callaghan & Mandy Tolley, Paul Stanley, Kai-Oi Jay Yung, David Alker, Ben Cove, Stratton Barrett & Peter Wankowicz, Cecilia Wee, Jake Geczy, Roisin Byrne, Christine Wong Yap, Ludovica Gioscia, Julie Hammonds & Kit Hammonds, Jason Minsky, Mark Haig & Sarah Perks, Ed Barton, Daniel Staincliffe, Margaret Cahill, Contents May Vary, Elizabeth Leeke, The Centre of Attention, Steve Hawley, Lee Campbell, Len Horsey, David Gledhill, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants & BABEL Working Group, Nicola Dale, Franz Otto Novotny.

Curated by Mike Chavez-Dawson, Re-Covering is an exhibition of works by 40 local and international artists who redesign the cover of an influential book onto a reclaimed piece of oak from school libraries. Displayed on an installation of shelves, the works are standard paperback size (110mm x 178mm x 15mm). Works in Re-Covering include: Travels in Hyper Reality [Umberto Eco]; Simulacra and Simulation [Jean Baudrillard]; The Waves [Virginia Woolf]; The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair [Enid Blyton]; The Shock of Medievalism [Kathleen Biddick]; The End of History and the Last Man [Francis Fukuyama]; and Journey to the Centre of the Earth [Jules Verne].

To coincide with Re-Covering is The Reading, a multiple writers’ residency initiated by the artist/writer Jane Chavez-Dawson. Produced by Mike Chavez-Dawson in collaboration with Jake Geczy and Matthew Pendergast, The Reading will develop throughout Re-Covering, with up to 70 writers working in Untitled Gallery in either 2.5 or 3 hour slots. Each writer produces a text to be projected onto the back wall of Untitled Gallery. All writers share the same brief: They must use the final paragraph of the previous writer’s work, and may use as stimuli the ambience of the gallery, the exhibition’s content, the stream of visitors and the knowledge that their writing is displayed in real-time.

As a live projection, this piece is entitled Network Aesthetics – The Reading, a curatorial extension of Re-Covering and features a live feed from writers participating in The Reading writers’ residency. Network Aesthetics – The Reading presents “writing as performance” [Phelan] whilst furthering “multiple iterations” [Derrida] of an exploration into live text as a performance document. The physical networks drawn across the participating venues intend to mimic scattered pages of an unfolding “intertextual” [Kristeva] novel. A live projection of the writing in real-time is to be displayed in Untitled Gallery and across multiple screens in Manchester, including Cornerhouse, CUBE, Chinese Arts Centre, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, and The Reading Room Collection, MMU Library.

Open Wednesday 12 – 7pm, Thursday – Saturday 12 – 6pm, Sunday 12 – 5pm

17 June – 31 July 2011