Présentation d’archives de la Maison Saint-Joseph was developed during my residency at Maison Saint-Joseph in Crépy-en-Valois, France. Through intuitive staging, juxtaposition, and speculative meaning-making, the exhibition functioned as a situated, embodied archive of my time there. This display took place on an approximately 10-foot wooden table in the residency’s formal dining room. Draped with mustard yellow, mint green, and light magenta curtains, more than 30 antiques, ephemeral items, and decorative objects from the site’s collection were arranged across the table. Books were slipped beneath the fabric to create varied elevations, producing a maximalist, almost childlike sense of curiosity and discovery. Rather than presenting the collection of objects through a fixed, historical lens, a more responsive approach was taken in which formal decisions could be made alongside the discovery of truths, both historical and theoretical, that existed within each object.

There is a running joke between some of my friends and I that ‘you’re not a museum unless you have an Alexander Calder piece in your collection on display.’ Now, of course this is a sarcastic joke, but there is some validity to it. Calder was an American sculpture best known for his innovative “mobile” sculptures who gained prominence in the art world in the 1920s. He created over 16,000 pieces of art throughout his life and they are in many of the world’s largest museums including The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art. Personally, it seems as though every large museum I visit I see a Calder piece or two. Each time I see his work I chuckle to myself for a second and think “ahh, so here is their Calder piece.” Most recently, I saw his work during my visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. I started asking myself, “I wonder why everyone has Calder pieces??” I mean, I knew a little bit about Calder, but clearly not enough. I thought, “if he is in damn near every museum I visit, I should probably know more about him.” [ Read more ]