The Monkey Head Collection will be a limited edition box set in a still yet to be determined form. The edition will include all nine lab books created in conjunction with each researcher during their iteration of the With Everything But the Monkey Head, along with a project catalog produced by the ICI, which will summarize the project ‘findings’ as we work to theorize the untheorizable within visual research (10 books in total)..
These are the initial books that will comprise this unique limited edition set.
MH Iteration 01: Martin Gantman
Part journal, workbook, recipe book, and itinerary, this chronicle will provide a snapshot of Martin Gantman’s exploration into the terms used to set up the project. He asks, what is theory, what is research, or practice, and what is an activity or event that is ‘something-based?’
MH Iteration 02: Anna Ayeroff
For Ayeroff, the photographic operates in relation to rather than in production of the places she visits. In this practice-based research model, the photograph is not used to document research but is active, embodied, and performative within a changing space that is research – research that is capable of rupturing our way of seeing and thinking.’
MH Iteration 03: Antoinette LaFarge
The roles of happenstance, coincidence and serendipitous tangents within the research process take center stage as LaFarge engages with the newly realized (yet wholly) unconscious influence of the letter ‘W’ throughout her practice as an artist, writer, and scholar.
MH Iteration 04: Greg Cohen
For Cohen, research stems from investigation of the unknown. He employs modes of self-portraiture to explore the interplay of appropriation and fictive constructions, pondering how such acts of ‘borrowing’ and ‘making’ contribute to a speculative research practice.
MH Iteration 05: Christian Smith
Smith explores the roles of materials and technique within the setting of research parameters. Utilizing antiquated wet-plate photography processes in a portable darkroom, Smith aims to capture new environments in old ways as he continues to build his experimental, alternative map of Los Angeles.
MH Iteration 06: Christel Dillbohner
Dillbohner examines the roles of coincidence and serendipity, to render the (seemingly) invisible connection between these two phenomena into visibility and generate new possibilities for seeing and being in the world—ones which demand the conscientiousness of open eyes and an emptied mind to observe things “mit dem anderen Blick”.
MH Iteration 07: Pam Posey
Posey utilizes field data gathered on multiple trips to Iceland, interludes of analog observational techniques (drawing, printing, tracing), and an interest in hermeneutics to expand and “complicate” the simplifying and reductive tendencies of scientific classification systems.
MH Iteration 08: Amy Kaczur
Building off, Stitching Julia: installation for an imagined life and the persistence of inquiry, Kaczur attempts to mine and imagine the life and cultural shaping of Juliska Alt Kaczur through a singular photographic portrait.
MH Iteration 09: E of the We
The Thin End of the Wedge (the E of the We) embarks on an interpretive field project in Iceland, not in pursuit of a particular end or destination but as a means of sparking unforeseen and unknowable experiences as part two of “An Inconvenient Camera.”
Monkey Head Project Catalog
The catalog for With Everything But the Monkey Head will be an homage to 19th century salesman ‘dummy books’ which provided snippets and examples of all the best parts of the books in compact portable form, that lends itself to ideas which are still unfolding.
