The Overcoat

Artist's book work, featuring a text by Nicolai Gogol presented alongside a specially produced body of photographic works, using the act of republication as a radical intervention which inserts historical material into the present and re-contextualises contemporary artworks in relation to past productions.

The Overcoat is a book work that features 17 photographic works presented alongside the full text of a translation of Russian author Nicolai Gogol’s darkly comic acclaimed novella The Overcoat (1842). In this publication Gogol's satirical story about a lowly government copyist whose status is briefly transformed by the acquisition of a new coat, is presented alongside a group of large format analogue photographs of contemporary commercial displays shot mainly on the streets of London and Paris. Together the text and images reflect on the preoccupation with exterior markers of social status, connections between present day and historical circumstances, artistic re-purposing and the status of desire in relation to commodities & cultural artefacts. The Overcoat was published by Four Corners Books and is tenth in their series of Artist's Familiars featuring artists responses to classic, out of copyright works of literature. Other publications in the series include Blumfeld An Elderly Bachelor (Musgrave/ Kafka) Heart of Darkness (Banner/ Conrad) and Canterbury Tales (Chetwynd/ Chaucer).

The photographic works from The Overcoat have been presented as exhibition prints, alongside the book in three solo shows and two group shows.