This work is a site-specific Surrealist intervention into the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery archive (part of the larger exhibition "Voice Remainders"), recalling George Bataille’s Documents magazine or Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer. The work uses thirty four photographs from the primarily mid-century collection as well as vinyl texts I installed below the photographs. In this piece, I was interested in creating a ‘scene’ constructed out of both photographs and text, so that the viewer encountered the “image” of a voice or a sound in a square (suggesting perhaps the mediated voices of a political uprising), as well as dissonant images drawn from an archive of photographs. After curating photographs from the collection, I wrote a text that could both break down into individual phrases linked to photographic diptychs, and also be read as a continuous “scene,” with text and image conjunctions modifying how we think of these historical images - shifting meaning and function.
In this way, I'm approaching the images curated from the collection as a type of 'choral voicing' - one could think of it as the archive speaking itself, or images only partially severed from their contexts, and given new political agency because they are then free to speak to contemporary image-concerns, such as their place in the archive, their doubleness, or their potential to be reactivated via temporary collage (such as a google search).
