Archive Fever Dream centers the notion of the archive, from personal, historical, queer and pop cultural archives - to the forgotten and the remixed. The works range in form - sculpture, painting, textile, film, ceramics, performance and photography; together they register how media document and historicize differently. Many of the works are dreamy in medium, color and feeling - illusory metals, black and white gradients, distorted mirrors, the glowing light of television, electric green and hazy purples. Works in the exhibition’s library include excavations from contemporary archives - from social media to texts to objects that have escaped time, like journals. Archive Fever Dream mixes new work from local artists, and work mined from the curator’s archive of art and books. A tiny archive on the archive. 

Some of the artists fabricate directly from archival material. Nathan Storey’s print “Looking” is sourced from “The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts”, an American gay pornography zine from the 70s in which men would anonymously submit recollections of male-to-male encounters. Storey photographs these images and makes alive what would likely be forgotten, and provokes us to listen (Campt, 2017). Did he find love? Did he survive? Storey’s “Midnight Sun” and “Lost Highway” are made from queer NYC nightclub flyers in the 80s, during the heart of the AIDS crisis - there is an aura to these images.. Storey’s undulating strobic text piece is a remixed fragment from David Wojnarowicz's memoir, the multi-media artist who died of AIDS in 1992. His works are simultaneously a repository of trauma and transfiguration. There are queer archival works in the space’s bathroom from Storey, Rombach and Utah, amidst two small disco balls. Bathroom stalls have been a critical site for material and experiential archiving, especially in terms of queer culture - cruising, graffiti, warnings, numbers and secret encounters like a kiss (see Rombach’s painting behind the door). 

Garcia Vasquez’s floral textile works also start with archival materials as a source. They are reappropriated from Hausknecht Herbarium archives in Jena, Germany. They interrupt this stodgy archive, translating a collection of photo-realist drab drawings of “discovered” plants and flowers into abstract assemblages of layers of drawings that are then tufted into chromophobia-inducing color. They queer and rediscover the original material, and thereby question its authority. 

Artists in “Archive Fever” also use their bodies as a site of archival recording. Fodrie methodically photographs herself in different embodied movements, delegating what heavy and glorious glimpses the viewer sees. You can see a book of this process in the show’s small library, which also brings to bear the unseen and excluded parts of the process; Fodrie’s original performance belongs to her memory and no one else's. She documents both the negative and liminal spaces of an ongoing dance, talking with pinks, browns and blues. The paintings’ titles are mined from Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets”, an influence on the work.  There is an archive of feelings (including the blues) stored in her gestural marks. The library also contains Fodrie’s artistic journal from the time of making those works, with tabs placed by the artist, guiding the lurker into intimacies of process. 

Cole-Weiss also harkens to the body as storage and archive. Their self-portrait records the semi-permanence of a haircut, hair cloying to raw clay, remnants of the body that provoke the question of whose remnants - what gendered connotations do these vestiges contain? Utah’s film, “Not Quite a River” contemplates containers of embodiment, harnessing handmade filmic processes and digital mediations. Plioplyte uses her body as a medium; she adorns herself in lattice weavings composed of her figure, woven together to provide a transparent cloak. The pattern is mined from traditional Lithuanian weaving patterns transposing its craft history and placing it into contemporary landscapes. Garcia Vasquez’s “log cabin” quilt patterns are also pulled from craft history - from the era of the civil war.  She takes this history and makes it anew, asking what would the history of crypto mining look like? Her other metal-like sculpture poses this question to the archival registers of AI, producing imagery haunted by hallucinations. 

Archive Fever Dream contains several histories. But the notion of the archive transcends the historical. Rombach’s video “Black Lilith” refers to our everyday passive digital recording and more expansively, the living history of queer community. Queer histories, media histories, intimate histories, local histories, naturalist histories, are in dialogue to create current history. Works also play against historical information and instead archive fiction; Rombach’s phantasmagoric painting, « Psychic Cherries » makes Lynch’s Mulhollland Drive scene a totality, a permanent fixture of a moment becomes forever. And this iconic moment becomes queer film history.

Cherry does something similar in terms of creating new histories, and queering what we see as frivolous or valuable. He works with somewhat obscure mass cultural references like children’s toys, elevating their essence to the magical, spiritual. Cherry’s glowing lenticular lockets document a tchotchke lacking monetary value, but the labor and meticulous rendering lend unmistakable value to what is also a symbolic memory object. And so the show questions how we decide value? How is importance mediated and constructed by power? Archive Fever Dream investigates artists’ unique power to claim importance. Cherry in his depiction of mass cultural objects - like hot wheels, Animal Crossing and Betty Boop cartoons - takes the popular and transforms it into a unique object, restoring the aura lost in mass production (Benjamin,1935) while depicting the enchantment of nostalgia. In some ways, he is also a painter of history, if we consider history as something that “transforms documents into monuments” (Foucault, 1972).  

Archive Fever Dream makes a series of new monuments, some unexpected, some mundane, and some empowered. The title of the show refers to Derrida’s depiction of the drive towards the authenticity and authority of the archive (1995). But this exhibition also plays with the dreaminess of constructing memory. “Memory, private and individual, as much as collective and cultural, is constructed not reproduced” (Thelen,1989). And this construction in large part is based upon what knowledge is collected and preserved in the archival process. What objects are given new authority through material representation? And how is authenticity realized by these various depictions? Our culture has an anxiety about forgetting, but how often do we document without ever retrieving? Digital technologies also intersect with remembering, i.e. some things that are not easily searchable are excluded by the historical record, but that also means what is caught by the search engine may come to disproportionately dominate the historical record (Baron, 2014). 

Archive Fever Dream underlines the fuzzy material. And it emphasizes archives that often lack authority. These artworks respond to that anxious current of information overload, to remember the fragments, Archive Fever Dream asks, what does an archive do? Is it a vehicle for greater truth? Why are we so drawn to them? What do you wish you could store or retrieve? What has become obsolescent? What do you want to remember? Derrida says that there would be “no archive desire…without the possibility of a forgetfulness…”. The artists in Archive Fever Dream interrupt our time of constantly forgetting to bring up fertile shards of aesthetic and affective remembrance. A vivid dream that you must jot down upon waking, before it is gone.

Footnotes
1. Tina Campt, Listening to Images (2017): Tina Campt conceptualizes listening to images as “a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to other affective frequencies through which photographs register. It is a haptic encounter that foregrounds the frequencies of images and how they move, touch, and connect us to the event of the photo” (p.9, 2017). 
2. Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1935) addresses this idea of the lost aura when things are mass reproduced.
3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), also can be referenced in the show’s library.
4. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995), also can be referenced in the show’s library.
5. David Thelen, History as Social Memory, in Memory, History, Culture and the Mind (1989).
6. Jamie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (2014), also can be referenced in the show’s library.







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