Join us for the launch of Prepositions (Montez Press, 2024) by Timmy Simonds and Aaron Lehman. Prepositions is a catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once.

Schedule
17-18:00 Presentation and readings

About Prepositions
Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

Contributors
Assembly, CAConrad, Thom Donovan, Joseph Grigely, Bethany Ides, Thomas Laprade, Shaun Leonardo, Ona Lindquist, Ben Morgan-Cleveland, and Malcolm Peacock.

About the authors
Timmy Simonds is an artist who moves between object-making, writing, routines of caretaking, and participatory exercises. Through the fictional character of a teacher he calls MISS OTHMAR, Simonds examines the cultural expectations, nuances, and vulnerabilities inherent in the practice of teaching. This character animates objects and is also found in faculty meetings and workshops. He is currently developing a curriculum for the Miss Othmar School for Teachers, which will be housed at Montez Press Radio’s broadcast studio.

Aaron Lehman is an artist and designer living in Maine. His work attempts to understand art, language, and technology primarily as material processes that are both necessary for and byproducts of communication, through which we extend the self and body, and expand the potential for different types of contact. His work has been exhibited in NYC, London, and Mexico, and his collaborative radio work with Timothy Simonds airs on Montez Press Radio and WGXC Wave Farm.