Curator / Christian French

Accumulate

Laurie Cinotto
Karen Faust
Christian French
Julie Johnson
Mark Johnson
Helen Lessick
Tim & Debbie McNeil
Elizabeth Miller
Chris Mumford
Demi Raven
Susan Robb
Phil Stoiber
Sean Vale
Dale Yarger
Anonymous

January 2 – 31, 1999
Reception / Thursday, January 7, 6–9pm

Location / 310 1st Ave. (Elliot Bay Books Underground)

Uniquely encapsulating the essence of a moment, a place, a time, possessing a souvenir is much like having a fetish object, a magic vessel in which value is bottled up. A collection is an alternate gambit for conquering an infinite universe; a strategy wherein everything gets folded into the chain of signifiers that acts as a fence or border around an activated space.

Accumulate investigated a third class of activity. The groups presented were accumulations in the sense that while they were generally related to each other (bottles, for example, or letters, or rocks) the process of assembling the collection was often haphazard, spontaneous, or even, once set in motion, unwelcome (apparently, if you have a reputation for collecting something as odd as "Bot's dots," the little yellow or white bumps that indicate lines in the road, people begin to add to your collection unasked, even anonymously leaving them at your door-step).

Sean Vale's videotapes of the "Doctor Who" TV series, and Tim and Debbie McNeil's yardstick collection, evince a desire to overcome Space (by measuring it) and Time (the Doctor is of an ancient race of time-travelers tasked with maintaining order). Elizabeth Miller's well-worn hand-beaters, my cookbooks, Dale Yarger's candy containers, Susan Robb's teeth and dental molds, the anonymously gathered stack of vintage lunch boxes, all speak to a more visceral method for controlling the vastness of space: swallowing instead of being swallowed up by. Consumption is literally and metaphorically a strategy for overcoming the anxiety that comes with having lost one's sense of place in the order of things. Not everything in an accumulation makes sense, nor does an accumulation really help us to make sense of anything. Rather they function as material markers of a never-ending natural process, ebbing and flowing without ever fully explaining themselves.

Text by Christian French