Cambridge, MA

February 4, 2011

On view from March 1—April 10, 2011, FAX features work by nearly 100 artists from its initial installation at The Drawing Center, organized by João Ribas, including seminal examples of early telecommunications art. Each institution on the FAX tour invites up to twenty additional artists to submit works, which are then presented at all successive venues. These works may be transmitted to each participating institution’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The active accumulation of information—received in real time, in the exhibition space—includes drawings and texts, and even the inevitable junk faxes from telemarketers and local businesses as well. 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 foregrounds the role of drawing as a generative process.

The Carpenter Center’s list of invited artists includes Laylah Ali, Conrad Bakker, Kim Beck, Jennifer Bornstein, Matthew Brannon, Natalie Czech, Charles Goldman, Matthew Hale, William E. Jones, Nora Shultz, Amy Sillman, Molly Springfield, Megan Francis Sullivan, and Andrew Witkin.

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.