Aaron Carpenter’s The Art of Richard Tuttle is the first installment of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s three-exhibition Workaday series, addressing process, labour and the performative gesture. For each of these exhibitions, the artists will be spending three weeks working live within the gallery space to develop a new project.
Carpenter’s project is an exhibition of replicas, duplicates, imitations and likenesses of artworks by the American artist Richard Tuttle (b. 1941). Using the catalogue from Tuttle’s 2005 retrospective at SFMOMA as a working manual, Carpenter will be keeping regular office hours in the gallery in an attempt to reproduce, in some manner, all of the 317 works catalogued therein. Locating a specific intersection between ideas of artistic homage and durational performance, The Art of Richard Tuttle investigates notions of appropriation and authorship while providing a context for re-imagining the assumed connection between labour, commodity and the finished product.
For all three of the Workaday exhibitions, viewers are invited to drop in regularly to witness the development of these projects. The official reception for The Art of Richard Tuttle will be two weeks into Carpenter’s Herculean effort.
Aaron Carpenter is an artist living in Vancouver.
