[Winter 2023]
By Gary Michael Dault
Adam Leith Gollner
Montréal, Anteism, 2022, 158 p.
[Excerpt]
This book’s apparently truncated title, The Mystery of – whether chosen by its subjects, photographers and filmmakers (and brothers) Jason Sanchez and Carlos Sanchez, or by the book’s author, Adam Leith Gollner – is as provocatively incomplete (or at least open-ended) as are the brothers’ complex and disturbing photo-tableaux. The Mystery of is offered as Gollner’s protracted conversation with the Montreal-based brothers and a look back over the twenty-one years of their work to date and of the writer’s sustained friendship with them.
It is perhaps Gollner’s being a widely admired writer in his own right (with books to his credit such as The Fruit Hunters [2008] and The Book of Immortality [2013]) and not ever having been a practising art critic or curator that has resulted in the book’s breezy, cant-free, almost novelistically engaging tone – which is clearly evident from its very first paragraph: “The first artwork I ever bought,” Gollner writes, “was the first artwork ever sold by the Sanchez Brothers. I didn’t yet know Jason or Carlos when I came across Red Dress I, on the opening night of their first group exhibition in 2001 [a “student vernissage” at Montreal’s Concordia University], but we became friends for life within minutes. Now, nearly two decades later, Red Dress I still hangs in my front hall.” Both Gollner and Carlos Sanchez were twenty-four in 2001. Jason was only nineteen…
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: The Mystery of. In conversation with the Sanchez Brothers — Gary Michael Dault ]