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Institute: Under Hand
Closing Reception and Artist Talks:
April 19, 2-5 p.m.
"Institute: Under Hand" alludes to the traditional activity of the artist who makes unique objects or manipulates and retouches found objects under the 'authority of the hand.' Visitors to the ICI will find many projects that honor this long, rich tradition (The Oeillet Print Project and the AIDS Chronicles). But more often they will find evidence of another, more recent, artist tradition created from hands that direct an online theater (The Plaintext Players), draw a line on a map to a "fool's tower" and a buried library (top, left) (Interpretative Field Projects) or point to a person in an audience as an artist builds a tower of ideas (Evening of Lost Ideas). These hands have produced an archive of experiences and thought that denies marketable products.
For fifteen years, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry has collected and archived diverse manifestations of visual culture that can only be traced through apocryphal storytelling (Traumbagger), faint audio/visual recordings (Between Flesh and Blood: Charting Race in America) and odd, slowly disintegrating ephemera (The Ephemera Kabinett). Other physical material has formed at 'points of articulation' places where the ICI's burgeoning archive has been shuffled into palimpsests through acts of interpretation (The Manual of Lost Ideas). And it is here that "under hand" alludes to its other meaning‹the activity of the artist that is secretive and, at times, even deceptive. The visual researchers that work under ICI's banner are not as interested in enacting true re-constructions and re-presentations of the world under the "authority of the hand." Instead, ICI associates participate in processes of obfuscation, camouflage and fictive narration to expose "hands of authority" that hide or veil insidious, uncomfortable (and sometimes, hopeful) truths.
ICI: Under Hand will also feature the work of three long-standing members of the ICI collective. Martin Gantman (center, left) will present "Empire: Davos" in the ICI laboratory and an installation by Yolande Macias McKay (bottom,left) along with a presentation of the Plaintext Players founded by Antoinette LaFarge will occupy the ICI sanctuary. For more information, contact us: info@culturalinquiry.org