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Toban Nichols’ solo exhibition Oppobrium at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is the public debut of a book project he has been working towards over the past months culminating with a new installation, taking over the entire newly renovated gallery space. Oppobrium is an appropriation, deconstruction and reformat of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manners, 1969, thus creating an opprobrium. Taking apart the tome, Nichols scanned, recompiled on his computer and created an exact copy of the original text. Using the Optical Character Recognition computer program, an algorithm was designed to recontextualize the document replacing every fourth word of the text with a new word chosen after Nichols took a poll of words which came to mind related to the text reflecting on the antiquated notions of manners looking at the underlying idea of modernity in our culture. Somewhat a prank or a gag. Adobe has recently become an important venue for seeing new artists.
