Riot Act cover photoPublication launch, 8pm, International Workers’ Day 2013

Rereading The Riot Act,  And On — Vancouver 2011 is an artist’s book by author/curator Anakana Schofield and artist Jeremy Isao Speier, based on source materials compiled for Schofield’s 2011 curatorial project, Rereading The Riot Act. Part scrapbook, part research diary, this new book uses the 1935 reading of the Riot Act to unemployed workers and their families as a frame to examine Vancouver’s history of public protest.

Included in the book are images documenting some of the works and performances presented in 2011, including images from the Rereading The Riot Act Performance Cabaret held at the Waldorf Hotel, coincidentally presented on the same night as the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. The inarticulate explosion of petty mayhem in Vancouver’s downtown core on that night sharply contrasts with the principled, often articulate expressions of resistance in many of the historical documents left behind by relief camp organizers and protest leaders. Rereading The Riot Act,  And On — Vancouver 2011 is a collage of history, drawing on pamphlets, news clippings, photographs, first-person accounts, and official correspondence to produce an unconstrained, non-linear act of re-reading.

UNIT/PITT is pleased to bring this new book to the public. Printed and bound by Publication Studio Vancouver, it will be produced on-demand in short runs. The first copies will be available at the launch event on May 1st, 2013; they will be available afterward through UNIT/PITT, online at www.unitpitt.ca, and in selected outlets where artists’ books are sold.

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She contributes to the London Review of Books Blog, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe & Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Her first novel, Malarky, was published in 2012 and has been acclaimed by critics as well as being shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Jeremy Isao Speier is a Japanese-Canadian Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr College of Art & Design in 1992. He works in film/video, kinetic sculpture and sound, and installation. He has exhibited extensively across Canada in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and recently in 2011 at Blim Arts Society and Powell Street Festival, in 2012 at the Firehall Arts Centre, and forthcoming in 2013 at Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre with an exhibition catalogue, Double Zero: The Point Between Future Past (2013). www.jeremyisaospeier.com