This project developed as the result of an invitation from workroom g to participate in Signs on the Road. Three artist groups were asked to guest curate from a collection of anonymous images of found materials and ephemera donated by over one-hundred artists.
Camel's contribution to the project consisted of temporarily structuring the collection into an archive corresponding to chapters: Foreword, Painting, Sculpture, Cinema, Property, Etiquette, and Conclusion. Images from members of workroom g and Camel Collective were extracted, reprinted, and presented on the wall as a puzzling collective sequence, which included a portrait of Rudi Dutchke, an exhausted gallery intern, a paper shredder, and a Dutch copy of Ed McBain's Dood Op Zondag, among others. The sequence presents the possibility of coincidental or uncanny correspondences between the two groups’ choice of imagery.
A custom stamp was used, in the terminology of archivists, to "strike" or "kill" the images, fictitiously repressing or extracting them from circulation, while making them available as an archival structure. The stamp was displayed housed within a glass bell-jar. A screen print combining the conversational traces of our process into a condensed palimpsest was exhibited adjacent to the two groups’ images in an effort to index the psychic structures at play within any archival activity.
Exhbibited at:
Curatorial Research LabSigns on the Road, Winkleman Gallery,
organized by Curatorial project with workroom g, 2011