The concept of the archive is not a new one.
For centuries, humans have felt the need to document their existence. And while the tools have changed - from pigments to rocks to pencils to pixels - the goal has remained the same.
In 2017, the gallery at the Institute for the Humanities invited me back to create another video art piece and to curate a new exhibition that would explore the theme of archiving the past, present, and future. Curating this show was both challenging and poetic in that
a curator and an archivist are asked to accomplish a similar task – to represent an infinite amount of moments, ideologies, and experiences with a symbolic few. In discovering the commonality in this almost ridiculous task, the heart of the show became clear.
The archives we leave behind as humans are just that – uniquely human. In their beauty and complexity, they are most characteristically flawed. While putting together this show, my interest shifted from exhibiting our archives to questioning them. Because it is the questions surrounding this timeless ritual that warrant investigation. It is looking at what gets included, what gets deleted, and what is never recorded in the first place. It is the tools, the decisions, and the processes of our attempts to capture time that give us the most accurate insight into our past and our future.
The goal of this show is to question our archival techniques. It is to question how we got from painting on the inside of caves to projecting videos onto the outside of gallery walls. It is to instill a sense of wonder in our species and a sense of awareness within ourselves. It is a prompt to perhaps change the way we view our artifacts - not as history or as truth, but to view them as what they
truly are - as art.