Felix Kalmenson

Conversations
The Archivists
Curated By Cameron Lee
With work by Melissa Fisher, Felix Kalmenson and Zoe Solomon
XPACE Cultural Centre
February 1-23, 2013

Project Text:
Conversations was a time-based installation work by Felix Kalmenson presented as part of The Archivists group show at Xpace, Toronto, curated by Cameron Lee. Conversations consisted of a dot matrix printer mounted on an apparatus which printed on an 11 page loop of paper. The printer was set to print one of 24 news sources every hour on the hour for the duration of the show. The news sources were determined by culling the list of most trusted news sources from newstrust.com and including ones from the artists preference. The resultant effect is a scroll of obfuscation, the accumulation of daily events rendered illegible. Conversations is ultimately a failed attempt at archiving the present and an acknowledgment of our inability to objectively represent the complex events of daily life.

Sources:
Al Jazeera, Associated Press, The Atlantic, BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, Christian Science Monitor, Democracy Now, Der Spiegel, The Economist, The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Independent, Inter Press Service, LA Times, McClatchy, Mother Jones, New York Times, Politifact, Reuters, RT, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

Exhibition Text:
In The Archivists, artists Felix Kalmenson, Zoe Solomon, and Melissa Fisher collect and arrange materials from their everyday activities: visiting the library, reading the daily news and recycling. These activities are repeated, forming a ritualized process. In Date Due, Solomon compulsively saves her library withdrawal slips, which list the various books and videos she has selected dating from March 28, 2011 to the present. This collection forms an on-going narrative or documentary portrait of the artist as researcher. Kalmenson’s computer installation Conversations is a technical collaboration with Daniel Thornhill, which prints various daily newspaper editorials on a looped surface. Each proceeding set of printed text overlaps the previous on a single surface. This layered text renders the pointed content of each article as a singular, conflicted band of visual noise. Finally, Fisher composes a series of symmetrical site-specific installations in the negative spaces of the gallery surrounding Solomon and Kalmenson’s. Using collected materials from her previous works, Fisher will develop these current installations throughout the duration of the exhibition, photographing and reproducing them as printed motifs on fabric to be absorbed into a future project.