Arbitrary Taxonomies
As soon as there was human experience, there was art. Modern architect Louis Khan articulated this in his statement that “Art, which was immediately felt, was the first word … the first utterance.” Prehistoric-man created cave paintings, if not to proclaim his existence then to document it. This impulse exists throughout art history and is as ever relevant in contemporary art.
Bringing together artists with disparate practices, Arbitrary Taxonomies presents inventories of invented, existing, and insular worlds through documentation, as with the photographs of Rory Mulligan and Mickey Smith; the ritual of Catherine Lee’s Mark Drawings series; by conflating fiction and reality in Dave Charlesworth’s videos; or when Nina Katchadourain creates works that adhere to an inner logic. Each of these artists work according to a set of systems that are entirely personal, yet are open to multiple readings.
Dave Charlesworth creates a cohesive narrative out of found images in his video works. His latest project attempts to create an arbitrary visual archive of all the terms in the glossary of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, publications from the mid-twentieth century that documented the architecture of the British Isles.
Nina Katchadourian takes the approach of a dedicated scientist to the everyday experience, making order out of a chaotic world with unexpected results such as creating genealogical histories for found objects. The collage Lake Michigan demonstrates this ability to create a new context for the familiar.
In an obsessive daily studio practice, Catherine Lee filled each square in a grid of varying size with a personal hieroglyph to produce The Mark Drawings and The Mark Paintings series of the 1970s. The repetitive imagery results in small variations that reveal a personal system of coding, a record of thought told through abstraction.
Following the lead of historical street photographers, Rory Mulligan uses an existing framework to insert a personal perspective in landscape and portraiture. His collection of images ruminate on gay identity, the suburbs, and everyday weirdness.
Mickey Smith investigates the aesthetics of libraries and their collections, such as the New York Public Library and the Federal Depository Libraries, among others. The works are documentation of a dying form of print that the artist has expressed no sentimental attachment to, but rather serve as an aesthetic material for what she describes as “conceptual language-based, anthropological works”.
For more information, please contact Bridget Donlon at bridget.donlon@gmail.com