Record. Collect. Compose.

Record. Collect. Compose. was an exhibition I organized at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles that included the works of Marten Elder, Veronique d’Entremont, Aaron Giesel, Aspen Mays, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Rimas Šimaitis, and Emily Sudd.

Organizer's Statement

When making art with machines and technical processes, no matter what technique we use, every work begins with human need and desire. There is a tendency to believe that machines distance us, make us less ourselves, that they alienate us, but what we forget is that all machines are made by humans. Every object used in the process of making art is forged from human culture. You could go so far as to say that there is nothing more human than the machines we use to deepen our understanding of the world.

With photography as my point of departure, my goal here is consider many forms of technical media in the most human of terms. What are the human actions involved that underpin the desire to create an indexical representation of the world?

The actions I’ve chosen are RECORD, COLLECT and COMPOSE. RECORD is a surrogate for memory. It’s the impulse to keep track and our awareness of time’s passage. COLLECT is the human need to gather and categorize, to see similarities and differences. COMPOSE is seeing a slice of the world. It is choosing what to put in and what to leave out.

These actions unite a diverse group of artists working in different media, whose pieces reveal a desire to create transformed representations of real world places and things.

—Masood Kamandy

Installation Photographs by Michael Underhill

Download the show catalog (PDF, 483 KB)