On May 21, Fraenkel Gallery and publisher Transit Books will partner on a special evening of art and literature launching Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, an electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory. LaBarge will be joined in conversation by scholar and critic Nicholas Gamso to celebrate both the publication of Dog Days and the close of the Gallery’s most recent exhibition, Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum.
Doors open and wine reception begins at 6:00 pm. The program will begin at 6:15; the exhibition will be open to guests through 7:30 pm. Copies of Dog Days and Sanctum Sanctorum will be available for purchase.
Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence—where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t.
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage at gunpoint while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat. In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find “the good story”: the version that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, the short-enough one, the one with a moral or punchline. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?
An electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory that draws upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro, Dog Days channels form into political inquiry: interrogating how language and institutional structures constrain and distort our understandings of trauma, violence, and care. The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement that move beyond our desire for narrative containment, into a place where writing becomes a way of surviving.
“An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original.—Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of award-winning international and American literature based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works of literature that carry readers across borders and communities.
Since 1979, Fraenkel Gallery has presented almost 400 exhibitions exploring photography and its relation to other media. The gallery exhibits and publishes significant works of art in a variety of media spanning two centuries. We believe that to understand photographs it helps to see them in light of other objects, and vice versa.