Contact?
A Museum Records & Research Project by Ellis Martin.
CONTACT? looks at the threshold of the archive. Both the archive in its concept and Mills College Art Museum’s.
Museum Records + Research becomes the site of this installation. It is an installation with archival images and conceptual graves (plexi, pink wood). The archive becomes the mediator between time and history, author and influence, as Ellis Martin connects the contemporary queer to Sophie Calle’s The Graves, exhibited at MCAM in 1992, alongside her relationship to artist Hervé Guibert during the same period. Contact prods the relationships implicit in these two artist’s works, asking how close is close enough, asking how to be attentive when looking in.
“She calls herself a photographer, but Sophie Calle can’t even manage to take a proper photograph (although she is making progress). The first good photo she showed me — and she was indeed proud of it — was one of those monotonous pictures of American graves with just the inscription ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘twins’ or ‘first wife’, and she didn’t even point the camera: that was done by a friend who was with her.” Sophie Calle quoting Hervé Guibert’s introduction to a publication from Sophie Calle’s first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Contact? is on view in MCAM’s back Gallery through May 27. For more information about MR&R projects, visit us here.
