NYAB Event - Seth “Nothing Lasts”

Seth “Nothing Lasts”

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

This event has ended.

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of 80 drawings by Seth from Nothing Lasts, an autobiographical story from his recent and upcoming books Palookaville 22 and 23. In these drawings, Seth takes you on a tour of neighborhoods and memories from his adolescence. The exhibition also will feature a ten drawing story called Owen Moore, published in the Walrus Magazine, which imagines the life and work of an artist who achieved success only after his death. In these large ink drawings, Seth concocts a humorous and sad portrait of an overlooked artist devoted to his mother.

During the exhibition, the gallery will be screening Dominion, the award-winning film about Seth’s life and artistic practice, directed by Luc Chamberland for the National Film Board of Canada. Dominion refers to Seth’s fictional city that is enlivened by paper and cardboard building sculptures that he has been working on for the last decade, some of which will be on display alongside the film. Several related drawings and covers for Palookaville and Drawn & Quarterly will be on view as well.

Stitching together fragments from his past, Nothing Lasts tells of the steps both practical (buying comics, sending early drawings to a pen pal), and psychological (loneliness, difficult family life) that led Seth to becoming a cartoonist. We learn that he was called the “fittingly outdated” name “Back Issues” by bullies at school, and that an old cartoon provoked his first sexual feelings. He muses, “You can’t make up such details. Life is always handing you punch lines.” In this portrait of the artist as a young man, lost memories and forgotten faces play as important a role as the things that endure. Seth mentions a photograph of his mother “so hopeless” that it “disturbs [him],” and he declines to draw it. On another page he draws an old cigarette lighter he’s hung onto, as well as the story he’s been told about it: “It’s magic resided in its history. The lone Item to survive the bombing of Mother’s family home in London.”