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FAX
September 12 – December 20, 2009
Matt Sheridan Smith, "Untitled (contrast test) (detail)," 2008. Black and white inkjet print, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.
FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Although the technology for transmitting printed images and texts over distance dates from the nineteenth century—a machine by Scottish mechanic Alexander Bain patented in 1843—it was the introduction of the modern fax through commercially available machines in the 1970s that turned facsimiles into a ubiquitous communications medium for international business. Artists readily exploited its immediate, graphic, and interactive character, making it an important part of the history of telecommunications art, nestled between the legacy of mail art and the nascent practices of new media.
FAX will include drawings by over 100 artists that have each been submitted via fax machine. Over the course of the exhibition, as new works arrive via the museum's working fax machine, the exhibition will evolve as new works are added to the walls of the museum. All the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result—an ongoing cumulative project—is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Here, reproducible yet erratic production via the fax machine displaces traditional notions of the hand, still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and foreground the role of drawing as a generative process.
Peter Coffin, "Untitled," 2009. Facsimile on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
FAX is a traveling exhibition co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI. The guest curator is Joao Ribas. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were made possible, in part, by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions in The Drawing Center's project gallery; and by support to iCI from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and iCI Benefactor members Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.
Partial list of artists
- John Armleder
- Fia Backström
- Barbara Bloom
- Mel Bochner
- Peter Coffin
- Morgan Fischer
- Ryan Gander
- Liam Gillick
- Marissa Gonzalez
- Joseph Grigely
- Wade Guyton
- Eduardo Kac
- Glenn Ligon
- Corey McCorkle
- Josephine Meckseper
- Olivier Mosset
- William Pope L.
- Kay Rosen
- Josh Smith
- Christopher Williams
TEACHER RESOURCE PORTAL
The Contemporary Museum invites Baltimore area High School Teachers and Students to Participate in FAX through Drawing by Fax, an exhibition of drawings produced by teens and faxed to the Contemporary Museum. On-line Teacher Resources and participation details will be available soon!
Launching this fall, "teenFAX" is a teen program that continues the Contemporary Museum's innovative series of teen workshops that investigate the ways artists have used and responded to technology.
Teens and teachers from Baltimore and the five surrounding counties are invited to participate in the project through two resources, a series of free teacher workshops at the Contemporary Museum and an on–line teacher curriculum portal. These resources will provide teachers with lesson plans for drawing projects that encourage students to develop their visual thinking skills. Teachers will be provided with instruction for using drawings as a mode of cognition and communication, and a series of drawing projects for individuals and groups to create works for submission to the Contemporary's exhibition.
Thank You
The Contemporary Museum's 2008-2009 exhibition season is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, and the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund
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