The first collaboration between New Yorker Tyler Coburn and Londoner Sebastian Craig, "Ghostwriters" is an imaginary account of Brooklyn narrated in drawing, architecture and prose.  

Building upon the work of Robert Smithson and W.G. Sebald, among others, Coburn and Craig will transform Jack the Pelican Presents into a sparse visitor center, populated with an evolving array of objects and interventions, including Craig's projected 3D models of the gallery space; oversize, folded halftone prints of local buildings; and a binder filled with text documentation of improvisatory performances that Coburn staged, at Craig's request, throughout the neighborhood.  

View images from show

Read bios

Coburn and Craig in conversation

Much as Washington Irving invented an extended history for the young Dutch colony, in his novel Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), so Coburn and Craig consider the need for new myths, woven apace with the city's cycles of destruction and development.

Through an ongoing, transatlantic exchange, in which Coburn meticulously describes the art exhibitions and environs particular to Jack the Pelican's borough, Craig envisages a place he has never been—and that, for him, is synonymous 80's hip hop films, images of graffiti and The Cosby Show. Craig's ensuing drawings, ideas and instructions are translated by Coburn into the exhibition as objects, texts and propositions, caught halfway between imaginative minimalism and descriptive excess. Theirs is an architecture conceived to occupy a point in the constellation of projects drawn atop the map of the borough, but one which inclines towards the notional: offering hypotheses, not answers.

In Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities (1978), Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the many metropolises of his empire with such fanciful language as to suggest that each place may, in fact, be one of infinite outcomes of any given city. Coburn and Craig treat this condition of compossibility as integral to metropolis and exhibition alike and imbue the conventionally static form of the gallery show with ongoing products of their correspondence. "Ghostwriters" thus tells the story of its life, and like a text (and like a city), its account is subject to revision and amendment, obfuscation and revelation.

Like any text and any city, the exhibition has a grain, along or against which it may be read. To read along it is to observe much of what has been described in the paragraphs above. To read against is to discover a hidden side of this story: an array of off-site drawings made, often illegally, throughout the neighborhood.  Curious visitors may inquire as to their whereabouts, though seeing them will require those willing to transgress the limits of the public city.

We invite you to read along and against.