March 15 to March 21, 2019
Reading Room: After Archives, a collective exhibition highlights the multimedia artworks prompted by student research in the UCSC Special Collections & Archives and the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. Art Department students in the course “After Archives: Photographers and Research” engage the immediate context of the UCSC Special Collections & Archives and the Prelinger Library as source material for their artworks, exploring the effect that research-based production has on contemporary artistic practice. The collective exhibition challenges us to revisit and think critically about our relationship to archives, artifacts, traces, collective and cultural memory, public monuments, and alternate understandings of history and canons.
“Reading Room: After Archives” asks;
What is an archive? Who and what is archived? How is and has the archive been theorized? What kinds of art has been and is being produced in this area? What is our relationship to archive collections, and to an archival research at present moment? How does art produce knowledge compared to other disciplines, and how do artists and researchers use similar source material to different ends? What role does fiction have in a research-based practice?
Artists included: Hannah Andrews, Irma Barbosa, Noelle Bogart, Zolt Brown-Dunn, Alejandra Chavez, Raymond Chavez, Edgar Cruz, Danielle Del Rosario, Atessa Farmanfarmaian, Jared Guzman, Ané Hunt-Dusse, Kaleigh Jones, Yaozhi Liu, Sean Macnaughton, Mallory Mahon, K'Love Mercader, Coby Oblak, Alicia Persaud, Sigrid Santoyo, Ashley Rose Tacheira, Diego Torres-Casso, Lindsey Vande Wege, Yu Zheng, Sophie Zukoski, Raine Villa.
A special thanks to: UCSC Special Collections & Archives: Kate Dundon, Mary deVries, Frank Gravier, Luisa Haddad, Teresa Mora, Alix Norton, Irene Reti and Jessica Pigza; the Prelinger Library: Rick Prelinger and Megan Prelinger; the Sesnon Gallery: Shelby Graham, Ann Altstatt, and Irma Barbosa.