The photographs on exhibition are from sCRYPT, an ongoing project that writes and stages the archive - 'memory building' in a double sense. Initially housed in the Library of the Rochester Institute of Technology during its major expansion (1989-91), sCRYPT addressed the procedures by which an archive and its material structure are fabricated. The images displayed here record small geographic and architectural pathologies (building walks, spurious artifacts) performed on the construction site. Long exposures of up to an hour were used to question the self-evident immediacy of photographic documentation. Since the aberrational structures were traced, built, Š , dismantled and returned during exposure, they are only partially legible in the final images. Furthermore, the archivist-builder appears blurred to the point of invisibility. Library construction eventually shuttered and entombed what remained of the scenes and their spray-painted inscriptions. The spurious artifacts are now dispersed across the official building and the borrowed materials encrypted in their proper place.
Building Walk: 2, 1991.
Spurious Artifact: 12, 1991.
Spurious Artifact: 7, 1991.
Spurious Artifact: 31, 1991.
Spurious Artifact: 24, 1991.
Spurious Artifact: 23, 1991.
sCRYPT is triangulated with two other projects. A photographic sequence of cartogenic landscapes (1982-6) alludes to the beauty and pathology of the South African landscape during the late apartheid years. The hybrid visual text taken from point G (1993-)
draws from an art-historical investigation of cartographic and photographic archives from countries on three continents (Zimbabwe, South Africa, England, the United States).
It illuminates shared colonial fantasies as well as spatial/temporal dislocations and traces their unsettling effects on contemporary national identities.
"Home Movies" : digital image-text publication
"Home movies" demonstrates one form of my investigations in combining theory, history and practice in contemporary art.
It extrapolates from the center photograph on the cover of Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art #3. The photograph is one of a set charting changing dress codes in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria and shows a dress patterned with multiple heads of the Queen Elizabeth of England.
"Home movies" links the emblazoned Queen to my memories of the self-same Queen via her appearance as a logo on the first Rhodesian 'independence' stamp. Colonial inscriptions of the North American map (the piece was written in Ihaca, New York) are then noted. In order to answer the questions as to how such images are to be adressed, an outline of contemporary photography theory is given, drawing particularly on the work of John Tagg, Victor Burgin, and Roland Barthes.
The piece finishes by fabricating an image for contemporary Zimbabwe (page three - entitled "Victoria falls, Zimbabwe rises"). This is montaged from archival photographs and maps (some from Queen Victoria's time) to both envision and dis-place the colonial projects that the images originally served. This third image doubles as essay page/artwork; circulating in the publication space of the journal essay.
