The Art of Archiving

This Chapter explores how archival methodologies have been used, especially after the 1930s, to generate environmental or process-led artworks and how art has influenced our understanding of what constitutes an archive. The Chapter looks at practices of accumulation, collection and curation, focusing in particular on the cabinet of curiosity to show how, among other cultures of collection and exhibition, it acts as a predecessor to archival art, including a number of time capsules. The Chapter also shows how the cabinet acted as predecessor to how we present, document and archive ourselves through social media today. The apparatus of the archive is presented as the main tool we use to frame, preserve, disseminate, and aestheticize our lives, showing how we increasingly act as citizen archivists. The case studies for this chapter include works by Michel Duchamp; Robert Morris; Andy Warhol; Ant Farm and sosolimited.

Road Runners, March 7 to May 30, 2009

This exhibition brought together works and documents by over fifteen Canadian and international artists who have focused on the same subject: the road. Presenting works from the 1920s to the present day, the exhibition included works by Ant Farm, Robert Barry, Michel de Broin, Chris Burden, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Gnass, Rodney Graham, Abbas Kiarostami, Margaret Lawther, John Massey, Simon Morris, Ian Baxter, Edward Ruscha, Jon Sasaki, Roman Signer, Stephen Shore, Kerry Tribe, Bill Vazan, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace