Catherine Holly / The Academy of Realness — My Brother Is Not Daniel Richter / My Father Is Not Gehrhart

Artist publication / first edition
The Academy of Realness, New York, 2014
Approx. 36–40 pages including covers
Colour cover, black-and-white interiors
Staple-bound / photocopy and digital collage process
Edition of 15

Produced under the overlapping identities of Catherine Holly and The Academy of Realness, My Brother Is Not Daniel Richter / My Father Is Not Gehrhart functions as a displaced family album assembled through the language of contemporary art, found imagery, and unstable authorship. The title itself begins as a denial — a statement of distance from inherited positions and cultural associations — while simultaneously establishing new fictive relations.

Pages move through a stream of appropriated fragments: exhibition references, photographs of artists, photocopied reproductions, clipped texts, accidental pairings, retail residue, and detached captions. Figures appear without hierarchy. Daniel Richter, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jean Cocteau and anonymous source material coexist as equal image-events within a loose field of association.

Rather than operating as documentary evidence, the publication assembles a temporary structure of affiliations and misreadings. Names become stand-ins; images become relatives; cultural memory becomes reorganized through juxtaposition. The recurring use of stickers, Strand Bookstore price labels, transfers and photocopied residue leaves traces of acquisition and circulation visible rather than concealed.

The publication sits somewhere between artist book, image archive, zine, and conceptual scrapbook. Less concerned with narrative than with adjacency, it treats collecting itself as a compositional method — an early attempt to test how images, names and identities drift away from their original positions and acquire new relationships through editing and repetition.

Issued before later iterations of The New Rare, the work already contains many of the structural concerns that would continue through subsequent publications: pseudonymous production, unstable authorship, found material, and the movement of printed matter from private record toward autonomous object.

Original period item.