Bette A. and Brian Eno (Photos – zebooksusa)
While it’s unusual enough for an independent bookstore to present an artistic exhibition, it might be a first for one to include more than 300 original paintings. At North Figueroa Bookshop, Unnamed Press’s Slow Stories project, which opens Saturday, Sept. 19, at 5:00 pm, goes even further.
By Melanie Hooks
Slow Stories: Paintings by Bette A. and Brian Eno presents more than 300 original paintings from a collaborative series of 444 original, signed, and numbered works. The series was developed alongside Bette A.’s short-story collection Slow Stories and the limited vinyl pressing 2 Slow Stories.
The artists’ proceeds from each edition support the Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement centered on women role models and co-founded by Bette A., and EarthPercent, which directs support from the music industry toward organizations responding to the climate emergency and was co-founded by Brian Eno.
The Exhibition
At North Figueroa Bookshop, the paintings will be installed in a continuous five-row grid, reconstituting something of the larger visual field from which each individual work emerged. An intimate listening and reading area will offer visitors a place to spend time with *2 Slow Stories*, alongside a display presenting the book, vinyl recording, and one original painting together.
Each $444 edition includes one unique 20 × 20 cm painting on canvas board, signed and numbered by both artists; Bette A.’s jacketed hardcover Slow Stories; and the limited pressing of 2 Slow Stories on 12-inch white vinyl in a gatefold jacket. The two recordings have not been released digitally and are exclusive to this pressing. All available paintings can be viewed and selected through the online gallery.
Visitors to the exhibition may select a work from the wall and take home the complete edition—painting, book, and record—so that each purchase changes the shape of the field, allowing the installation to evolve over the course of the exhibition.
The Process
Bette and Brian worked with hundreds of canvas-board panels in circulation at once, spraying color through layered stencils and interrupting and responding to one another’s gestures. As Brian explains, “We were not really working on individual paintings. We were working on a whole field of paintings.” For Bette, the process required a willingness to “let go of expectation and dare to let the material speak to you.” A panel left this larger field only when the artists recognized it as complete in its own right.
That open process produced an unusually varied body of work. Minimal images containing only a few lines or suspended forms coexist with denser grids, veils, forests, mountains, color fields, and architectural fragments. Rather than illustrating particular scenes from the stories, the paintings create parallel visual spaces, suggestive but incomplete, leaving room for viewers to make connections and form images of their own.
The same openness shapes the record. On 2 Slow Stories, Bette reads “The Endless House” and “The Other Village” within ambient compositions by Brian Eno. Long musical intervals separate the spoken sentences, giving listeners time to construct landscapes and associations only partially supplied by the words. The paintings create a related visual space rather than illustrating the stories or translating the music. Across language, sound, silence, and image, the project leaves space for the audience to form connections and become creatively active.
No closing date for the exhibition has been listed.
Detail from “Slow Stories” visual (Photo – North Figueroa Bookshop)
Exhibit Opening Reception: "Slow Stories: Paintings by Bette A. and Brian Eno" Saturday, Sept 19 5:00 pm Location North Figueroa Bookshop 6040 N. Figueroa Blvd. Los Angeles 90042 Free.
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