Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera and 100 Walkers, West Hollywood—two works by Richard Kraft
Two works by Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft debut in April—the Siglio publication of Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera and the public artwork 100 Walkers, West Hollywood.
Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera
With interpolations by Danielle Dutton and a conversation with Ann Lauterbach
Artist Richard Kraft reassembles a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis to orchestrate a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered, collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging time. Proceeding from Thoreau’s observation, “Yes and No are lies. A true answer will not aim to establish anything, but rather to set all well afloat,” Kraft subverts all certainty to reconstruct a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and its own revelatory nonsense.
A signed and numbered limited edition, including an original postcard collage, is also available.
“Kraft’s book is duly dreamlike and mystical…pitting sense against nonsense in a way that’s both cosmic and buoyantly childlike.”
–Toronto Globe & Mail
“Richard Kraft and Danielle Dutton’s Here Comes Kitty, a collage project (Kraft’s) with written interludes (Dutton’s), beautifully, wantonly, defies review. Like a dream, it slips off the binds of the mind, building up structures which differ from those present upon rational waking.”
–Numéro Cinq
“Yet as one page compels us to the next, each simultaneously becomes a universe of its own. Subverting becomes telling, bombs become themes, and narrative turns itself sideways, upside-down.”
–BOMB magazine
Publication date: April 1, 2015 / Hardback / 64 pages all color / 32 USD
100 Walkers, West Hollywood
This large-scale performance work, commissioned by the City of West Hollywood, takes place on April 18, 2015. One hundred walkers, each dressed in a suit and bowler hat wearing a sandwich board (with a unique image on both front and back) will form a grid and then slowly disperse throughout the city, each walking an individual, pre-determined route. The walkers will slowly disperse, each walking an individual, pre-determined route throughout the city.
The sandwich boards draw on various lexica, both visual and verbal, that include aphorisms, painted hand gestures, imagery from children’s books, photographs of the elemental, war and resistance, dissidents and civil rights activists. Subverting a form traditionally associated with advertising (whether for a product or an ideology), the sandwich boards here have nothing to sell. Instead they invite multiple associations and connections.
Collectively, the walkers form an unusual army of incongruities and juxtapositions which inject humor, commentary, distortion, as well as glimpses of parallel moments in space and time. Individually, each walker will capture the attention of most passersby (particularly those who are driving) for just a blink, enough to interrupt daily life and shift the viewer’s awareness of their world.
The grid assembles at the El Tovar lot between Robertson and San Vicente Boulevards at 2pm. Walkers can be seen throughout West Hollywood on most major streets until approximately 5pm.
Richard Kraft is a multidisciplinary artist whose works often use public spaces (library aisles, sides of buses, city streets, cow pastures, abandoned airforce bases) as well as converse with the literary (using language, book pages, and appropriated narratives as material). He is co-editing, with artist Joe Biel, the first complete volume of John Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) to be published by Siglio in October 2015. His most recent solo exhibition was Which Is to Say, a ten-channel video installation at the Laguna Art Museum. Born in London, he now lives and works in Los Angeles.
About Siglio Press
Siglio is an independent press dedicated to publishing uncommon books and editions that live at the intersection of art & literature: inimitable, visionary works by renowned as well as little known artists and writers that defy categories and thoroughly engage a reader’s intellect and imagination.
