FAX
Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled (contrast test) (detail), 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.
Peter Coffin, Untitled, 2009
Installation view, FAX, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Level 1, on view Mar 1–Apr 10, 2011.
Installation view, FAX, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Level 1, on view Mar 1–Apr 10, 2011.
Installation view, FAX, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Level 1, on view Mar 1–Apr 10, 2011.
Installation view, FAX, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Level 1, on view Mar 1–Apr 10, 2011.
Installation view, FAX, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Level 1, on view Mar 1–Apr 10, 2011.
FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, architects, designers, scientists, filmmakers and writers to reconceive of the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Participants transmit their fax-based work via the venues' working fax lines through the duration of the exhibition's tour. FAX was conceived by João Ribas, who curated its initial exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. Faxes by nearly 100 participants were sent to the Drawing Center and these works form the core of the traveling exhibition. Each institution invites additional participants to submit works, which will then be archived with The Drawing Center's collection to create an evolving document of all participants. The accumulation of information-received in real time, in the exhibition space-includes drawings and texts, and the inevitable junk faxes and errors of transmission, creating an ongoing cumulative project.
The artists invited by the Carpenter Center to participate include:
Laylah Ali
Conrad Bakker
Kim Beck
Ashley Bickerton
Jennifer Bornstein
Matthew Brannon
Natalie Czech
Charles Goldman
Mathew Hale
Nate Heiges
William E. Jones
Matt Mullican
Nora Schultz
Amy Sillman
Mollly Springfield
Josef Strau
Megan Francis Sullivan
Andrew Witkin
Han Yu
João Ribas
João Ribas is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. He was previously curator at The Drawing Center in New York. His writing has appeared in numerous art and culture publications, and he has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Ribas is the winner of three consecutive AICA Awards for Best Exhibition in a Non-Profit Space (2008-2010), and of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.
FAX is a traveling exhibition co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and circulated by ICI. The guest curator is João 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.
