NEW YORK, NY.- Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Tim Youd: Ecstatic Reading, opening Thursday, July 13th and continuing through Friday, August 18th. This is Youd’s first solo exhibition in New York City, and the artist will be performing at the opening.

For his New York debut, Youd will continue his 100 Novels project by retyping Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley at the Cristin Tierney Gallery. The exhibition will also feature a selection of drawings and works on paper.

A performance and visual artist, Youd is presently retyping 100 novels over a ten-year period while concurrently compiling a body of related paintings, drawings, and sculptures. During each of his performances, Youd retypes novels on the same make and model typewriter the author used, in a location charged with literary significance specific to the novel. This summer, Youd is retyping four novels in Italy in an “Italian cycle,” which will culminate in his retyping of The Talented Mr. Ripley in New York. This performance will pay tribute to Highsmith’s protagonist Tom Ripley, who escapes his troubles in New York by sailing on an ocean liner to Venice.

Each book is typed on a single sheet of paper, which is laid on top of a second sheet and run repeatedly through the typewriter. Upon completion, the two sheets are separated and mounted side-by-side as a diptych. They serve as a relic of the performance, containing all of the artist’s keystrokes within the rectangular form of two pages of an open book.

Youd describes the act of reading as devotional, requiring such total involvement as to make him lose awareness of time, space, and surroundings. Ecstatic Reading derives its name from this altered state of consciousness, and the transcendence experienced by Youd in his performances as he re-types entire novels from beginning to end.

Diptychs from past performances will be on view in the gallery, and will include Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, John Rechy’s City of Night, and Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, among others. Also on view will be a selection of typewriter drawings. Illustrated by 100 Olivetti Lettera 32s with Tally, the drawings are composed of one hundred accumulated and superimposed outlines of the same model typewriter, with a small index at the bottom logging how many times and on which days Youd drew the image.

Youd recently retyped another Highsmith novel, Those Who Walk Away, in Venice during the Biennale previews in collaboration with the Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University. He is currently completing John Williams’ Augustus at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome. These performances are part of an extensive tour of Italy where he will also retype Elizabeth Von Arnim’s The Enchanted April in Portofino and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in Stresa. The diptychs created during Youd’s “Italian cycle” will travel, with select drawings and paintings, to the Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University for a solo exhibition in fall 2017. Additional 100 Novels performances will be held in conjunction with an exhibition in 2018 at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, where Youd will retype multiple novels in a “Hudson Valley cycle.”

To date, Youd (b. 1967, Worcester, MA) has retyped 50 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. He has been in residence at historic writer’s homes, including William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), and Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House (Rodmell, Sussex). His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, University of Mississippi Art Museum at Rowan Oak, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Youd has presented and performed his 100 Novels project at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and LAXART, and in January 2017 he finished retyping Joe Orton’s Collected Plays at The Queen’s Theatre with MOCA London. The artist’s work is currently on view at the Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, where his experimental 9-hour retyping video anchors the exhibition Radical Forms of Writing. He lives and works in Los Angeles.