Opening - March 16, 6 – 9pm
On view - March 16 to June 2, 2017
33-00 Northern Blvd
Long Island City, Queens
While advances in technology have made physical photographic slides obsolete, this exhibition, created entirely from the recently digitized slide collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reinvents the format as a new artistic medium.
Materials for the Arts, the creative re-use center of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have teamed up to showcase new artwork created and inspired by the Met’s slide collection.
Participating artists include Martina Mrongovius, Michael Kelly Williams, Andrea Wolf, and Dustin Yellin, as well as work produced in the Teens Take the Met workshop with Jean Shin. With 5,000 years of art history at their disposal, these artists’ interpretations provide an opportunity to explore and imagine the future of institutional archives and their role in how we experience museums and culture at large. an-archive is the project Andrea Wolf created for this exhibition and it is meant to be experienced both as a multi-screen installation in the gallery and as an online archive at an-archive.net
an-archive is a quote of a quote of a quote. an-archive is an exercise on appropriation and a reflection on the (methods of) production of knowledge. an-archive subscribes to the notion of the archive as an open-ended artifact, a rhizomatic networked experience. an-archive aims to unpack some of the narratives inscribed in the document and at the same time suggest new possible interpretations by adding annotations and quotes from several texts that inform my work. an-archive has no order, categorization, label or taxonomy to follow. Just by pressing a key or refreshing the site, a new slide will appear.
For the installation at MFTA, multiple screens are used to augment the notion of repetition and representation, by displaying the same image. A large dome-shaped push button – that in itself is full of allegories – invites the viewer to interact with the piece. As an online project, an-archive.net will continue to grow and feed from the massive Met’s slide archive. True to its nature, this archive produces more archive and remains open to the future.