Vid Ingelevics - Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla/page 2 of 3

Project methodology, rationale • The Metropolitan Musem of Edward Milla
My installation work, The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla, reconstructs Milla's exhibition not through the use of original prints but by scanning the exhibition components from Milla's own installation photographs of his 1951 exhibition (these are the images on the first page of this section). The elements that Milla placed in Gallery B-13 - wall texts and large panels that each held multiple individual images - were separately scanned at a very high resolution. These elements were "squared" by digitally correcting for the effects of perspective and then sized back up to the scale they would have had in Milla's exhibition (the Met's baseboards as they appeared in Milla's installation photos were used as a "ruler"). The inkjet printouts were then placed in the same sequence as in the original 1951 exhibition. Some small shifts occurred due to variance between the size and shape of the Met's gallery v.s. the exhibition space at York University, Toronto, where I first installed my "re-construction." The net result was that exhibition viewers stood inside a composite, life-size photograph of Edward Milla's Up At The Photographer's exhibition. My installation summoned up the missing sense of space and volume that photographic documentation removes in its transformation of its subjects. It is important to note that the affect of physical space that the installation produces is dissolved, of course, by the documentation of the project. There are several reasons why I chose this way of working with Milla's photographs. While it might at first seem that one simply needed to locate the original photographs this was impossible in practise. Milla's photographs of	well-known art objects were more easily tracked down but at least 2/3 of the images in Milla's exhibition were not of artworks. To locate these images in an archive of over one million negatives was out of the question. It is an example of how archives may both preserve and, yet, make invisible their contents. Another problematising factor was that the hand-written texts with which Milla captioned his images were often illegible. The distance of these texts from the camera often rendered them a blur (see image 16 above). Without access to Milla's own words the idea of a faithful replication of the exhibition was not possible. The only link to the full exhibition was Milla's own documentation. However, it was important that viewers of my installation realize this and have a chance to ponder the limits of those "records." For that reason, the strategy of scanning Milla's documentation in order to extract the maximum amount of information possible from his images was arrived at. Ironically, the high resolution of the scanner and the high resolution of Milla's large format photography combine to produce images that refuse to come into focus no matter what distance (literal and figurative) from the work is taken by the viewer. Milla's 1951 exhibition exists again in my installation but in a spectral form, inevitably inadequate, as it offers insight into the nature of what photography actually does to its objects. While the images in this installation resemble photographs, they are not, in fact. They have more in common with photocopies.

Project methodology, rationale • The Metropolitan Musem of Edward Milla

My installation work, The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla, reconstructs Milla's exhibition not through the use of original prints but by scanning the exhibition components from Milla's own installation photographs of his 1951 exhibition (these are the images on the first page of this section).

The elements that Milla placed in Gallery B-13 - wall texts and large panels that each held multiple individual images - were separately scanned at a very high resolution. These elements were "squared" by digitally correcting for the effects of perspective and then sized back up to the scale they would have had in Milla's exhibition (the Met's baseboards as they appeared in Milla's installation photos were used as a "ruler"). The inkjet printouts were then placed in the same sequence as in the original 1951 exhibition. Some small shifts occurred due to variance between the size and shape of the Met's gallery v.s. the exhibition space at York University, Toronto, where I first installed my "re-construction." The net result was that exhibition viewers stood inside a composite, life-size photograph of Edward Milla's Up At The Photographer's exhibition. My installation summoned up the missing sense of space and volume that photographic documentation removes in its transformation of its subjects. It is important to note that the affect of physical space that the installation produces is dissolved, of course, by the documentation of the project.

There are several reasons why I chose this way of working with Milla's photographs. While it might at first seem that one simply needed to locate the original photographs this was impossible in practise. Milla's photographs of

well-known art objects were more easily tracked down but at least 2/3 of the images in Milla's exhibition were not of artworks. To locate these images in an archive of over one million negatives was out of the question. It is an example of how archives may both preserve and, yet, make invisible their contents.

Another problematising factor was that the hand-written texts with which Milla captioned his images were often illegible. The distance of these texts from the camera often rendered them a blur (see image 16 above). Without access to Milla's own words the idea of a faithful replication of the exhibition was not possible. The only link to the full exhibition was Milla's own documentation. However, it was important that viewers of my installation realize this and have a chance to ponder the limits of those "records." For that reason, the strategy of scanning Milla's documentation in order to extract the maximum amount of information possible from his images was arrived at.

Ironically, the high resolution of the scanner and the high resolution of Milla's large format photography combine to produce images that refuse to come into focus no matter what distance (literal and figurative) from the work is taken by the viewer. Milla's 1951 exhibition exists again in my installation but in a spectral form, inevitably inadequate, as it offers insight into the nature of what photography actually does to its objects. While the images in this installation resemble photographs, they are not, in fact. They have more in common with photocopies.


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