This new collaborative exhibition by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Brian McClave combines and modifies the structural aspects of two previous projects and plugs new variables of content into the equation. Here follows two brief summaries of the previously displayed exhibitions, as well as a synopsis of the new elements appearing in Geegaw + Scientifikk = Logikkal Trifle?

Steps Towards an Understanding of a Severed Human Head functions as an exploded document of a trip taken by McClave and Apicella-Hitchcock to photograph in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA on September 11, 1995. The photographs of preserved human specimens operate as the core of the exhibition and dispassionately present individuals’ anatomical afflictions. The piece then obsessively deconstructs the process of presentation by providing the much needed contextualizing information for the images. The artists have taken the utmost care to include every scrap of personal information relating to the trip and the production of the resultant exhibition. The exhibition is divided into two rooms, the first room contains the mass of information surrounding the photographers’ personal involvement with the project, and the photographs made on that day. The second room functions as an idealized example of the endless cycling of representation. A device fashioned out of used domestic objects automatically produces objective images of the overall exhibition every hour.

A Methodical Elimination of Drudgery: Crude but Adequate picks up where Steps Towards an Understanding... left off, in that the exhibition examines a procedure in its entirety. The first room of “A Methodical Elimination of Drudgery...” contains an abandoned washing machine which is clinically dismantled piece by piece. The machine is displayed in its sum; each fragment carefully arranged on a shelf running the perimeter of the room. Accompanying each element from the washer is an identifying time-coded placard indicating the moment at which that individual piece was removed from the whole machine. The room is cold and empty, aside from the disassembled parts and a fluorescent light hanging in the middle of the space. A poignant country song repeats endlessly at a low volume. The second room contains an elaborate and theatrical distillation system that extracts dirt from the artist’s clothes worn during the production and upkeep of the exhibition. The results are recorded and cataloged every day. Shelves hold sample jars containing dirty laundry water, the clean water that was generated, residual dirt, and Polaroids of the clothing worn. A soundtrack of boiling and bubbling pervades the room.

Geegaw + Scientifikk = Logikkal Trifle? continues the process of examining photo-based media and attempting to contextualize its apparent objectivity. In this show the photographic act is paired down to its bare minimum with the entire show functioning as an exploded view of all the factors, both physical and conceptual, that come into play to make a single photographically generated, animated image.

In December 1998 the two artists began a three-day trip to make a simple, animated loop of a yet unknown object in the State of New York Medical Examiners office in Buffalo. They had only the clothes in which they were standing and some money. Over the next three days they traveled from New York City’s Pennsylvania Station to Buffalo, researched within the medical examiners office, and made the eight photographic stills that would comprise the final animation.

All objects that were utilized in the preparation and production of the animation were collected and stored into an ever increasing number of trash bags. Essentially, the entire ‘story’ of the expedition was stored in these containers; a narrative comprised of soda cans, receipts, candy wrappers, bus tickets, scotch tape, sodium sulfide, etc.

The culmination of the mounting piles of debris; the item that was finally selected to be the subject of the animation, turned out to be a dusty video camera suspended from the ceiling of the room where human remains are stored. This mediating device sends electronic images of the deceased to a separate room where next of kin identify the bodies. Rather than create an image of a more sensational nature, it was of paramount importance to find a subject that evoked the banality intrinsic to the other items gathered along the way. A crude pinhole animation system was created around the video camera, and the eight-frame ending point to the narrative was produced.

Weeks after the initial production of the images the trash bags were brought into the clinical workspace of the gallery, whereupon, employing subjective memory and pseudo-scientific cataloging practices, the artifacts were organized with the goal of reconstructing the original narrative. In this context the bags of rubbish became unsorted archaeological material, or complicated legal evidence through which, by a process of analysis and application of imaginative theories, meaning was constructed. The resultant display takes on the logical form of a ‘time line’ leading up to the creation of the animation, however, branching out from this sequence are the tangents, digressions and embellishments that occur when theory, memory, and history merge.