Project description • Conditional Report

"Conditional Report" was commissioned by the Ryerson Image Centre as part of the group exhibition, Archival Dialogues (Sept. 29, 2012 - Dec. 16, 2012) curated by Doina Popescu and Peggy Gale.

All of the commissioned artists (Christina Battle, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Stan Douglas, Vera Frenkel, Vid Ingelevics, David Rokeby and Michael Snow) were asked to engage with the Black Star photography collection, an accumulation of approximately 300,000 photographs that document many of the major events of the 20th century.

The Black Star was an important commercial photo agency based in New York from the mid-1930s. This collection was donated to Ryerson University several years ago by a private collector accompanied by funds for its storage and preservation. This set off a chain of events that led to renovation of Ryerson Image Arts building and, as part of that, to the construction of a new professional art gallery and study centre devoted to historical and contemporary photography.

Archival Dialogues (and an accompanying show of the work of recent Ryerson graduates, Art of the Archive) was the first exhibition held in the new gallery.

"Conditional Report" takes as its premise that an archive, collection or, perhaps more accurately, an accumulation such as that of the Black Star is never a completely fixed entity - neither in it's meaning nor it's site. The form of the installation is based on the provisional structure constructed inside the warehouse of an art storage company in the suburbs of Toronto, where the Black Star images were stored for several years before their arrival at the Ryerson Image Centre in June, 2012.

Project description • Conditional Report

At that site, the images were stored in archival boxes inside a plastic and wood structure whose interior was environmentally controlled (humidity, temperature). As well, inside the structure the images were being scanned, one by one by a single person, a monumental task that will take years to complete.

The sounds of the air handling units and the scanner - incorporated into my installation - were thus symbols of the shifting meaning of the Black Star photographs as they moved from their original site(s) in Black Star office filing cabinets in New York City to the climate-controlled space of the Ryerson Image Centre's state-of-the-art storage vault.

The temporary structure installed in the gallery included a rear projection screen at either end upon which the viewer could see two different looping videos. At one end was an 8-minute video that focused on the preservation of the Black Star images the through scanning of the "original" photos and the seemingly contradictory destruction of the copies produced for temporary exhibitions from those scans due to complex copyright issues.

At the other end was a 5-minute, sixteen-panel video that brought together - as a new "archive" - many of the forms of labour that the arrival of the Black Star at Ryerson University was the catalyst for (including the construction of the gallery and the installation work itself).