by VINCENT TINGUELY

For the past 10 years or so, Joey Dubuc's been pursuing an interest in complex networks. Today, he might reference Deleuze, Derrida and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, but the way he sees it, it's a fascination that goes right back to his childhood.

"It went from abstract doodles to networks," Dubuc explains. "When I look back at the stuff that I did as a kid, there's always grandiose worlds where I would go, ‘If you go over here, you've got this person, and he's connected to that person.'"

Dubuc has shown his visual art in Toronto's A-Space and Redhead galleries, as well as in a couple of group shows at Rad'a, here in Montreal. But his latest work is Neither Either Nor Or, a book that explores multiple plot outcomes. It started as a single-copy artist's bookwork. "Initially I looked at it as a conceptual project that was part of visual work," says Dubuc. "It was an object. It was just, ‘Oh yeah, I want to make a book, and I want it to look like this.' And then it was, ‘Oh, now I have to write it,' and all of a sudden it became a more literary experience for me, but only after the fact."

The future holds more of the same - he's currently laying the groundwork for a series of gallery shows. "If you were to take the book that I've written, and you were to lay it out as a diagram or a map - which I've done several times for the book - that map is where I'm going," Dubuc says. "I'm looking at the process of that map as being the key element in what I want to work on. So it'll be a variety of different projects, but they're all back to the same idea, which is digressions, splittings, decisions and networks."

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