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THIS:THAT was a collaborative response to the body of work created by the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti (1940-94). His oeuvre demonstrated a consuming interest in numeric, linguistic and classificatory systems including games, numbers, words, dates and sequences.
In 2017 Corey Drieth and Wylie visited the retrospective Boetti exhibition MAXIMUM minimum at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. One room of the exhibit paid homage to Boetti’s multivalent use of copies in his practice. Inspired by Boetti’s interest in collaboration and the playful, Drieth and Wylie decided to make a game of the activity and created a patterned set of prints made of their fingertips on the copier glass. That series of notations or ‘score’ became the starting point for their project THIS:THAT.
Drieth and Wylie decided that they would each make one piece of art per month for year 2018 responding to the score. Because Boetti was especially intrigued by the number eleven and the individual digits of 2018 (2+0+1+8) add up to eleven, Drieth and Wylie chose to end their art making game in November, the eleventh month of that year. The twenty-two pieces of art produced for the project were in this way loosely collaborative but also responsive to the established instructions, their ongoing enthusiasm for Boetti, and, ultimately, the eleven sheets of black and red copy paper that made up the score.
Dreith’s responses can be found at www.cdrieth.com