Have You Seen This Kitten?
Ron Terada
Have You Seen This Kitten? (2008) is a poster insert and supplement to Defile (2003), a magazine project whose sole content comprised advertising exchanges with national and international art magazines. The poster functions as a call to try to locate twenty-one back issues that featured the Defile “kitten” advertisement. The resulting do-it-yourself collection of magazines—and its subsequent photo-documentation—would constitute the final work.
Poster Text
If you would like to have an original work by Ron Terada, find the following twenty-one magazines that advertised with Defile (Issue 1): Afterall (Issue 7), Artforum (Issue 6), Art Monthly (Issue 264), Art on Paper (Issue 5), Art Papers (Issue 2), Border Crossings (Issue 85), C Magazine (Issue 77), Cabinet (Issue 10), Camera Austria (Issue 81), Canadian Art (Issue 1), CV (Issue 60), Exit (Issue 9), Flash Art (Issue 229), Frieze (Issue 73), Kunst-Bulletin (Issue 1/2), Parachute (Issue 110), Parkett (Issue 67), Prefix Photo (Issue 7), Springerin (Issue 1), Teme Celeste (Issue 96), Zingmagazine (Issue 18).
All magazines were published in 2003 and each issue can be identified by the Defile kitten advert. Next, arrange all magazines into either a stack, a pile, or a spill and then photograph the desired result. Where possible, leave as many magazine covers or spines legible in the final photo. Mail two Letter or A4 size copies of the photograph to The Fillip Review, 305 Cambie Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 2N4, Canada. The artist will sign both copies and return one to the sender authenticating the collected magazines as an artwork.
Image: Ron Terada, Have You Seen this Kitten, 2008. Poster. Courtesy of the artist
About the Author
Ron Terada lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Recent exhibitions include Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga (2008); Words Fail Me, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2007); The Show Will Be Open When The Show Will Be Closed, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2006); and General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1990–2005, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2005).