Mailto: is the current exhibition at Driftstation gallery and performance space, Nebraska.
The exhibition is built around the open portal of an email address. Beginning in early May, works or messages of any kind sent in the body of an email or as an attachment to anything@driftstation.org were printed and hung, up through the end of the opening reception. 652 emails, totaling over 2,500 pages were printed and installed.
I submitted an email to the project containing digital copies of some of my drawings. Initially I was racking my brain to submit something clever in response to the concept of the project. However, after writing and re-writing my email several times over I decided that a very simple submission, like a stripped back exhibition submission, would do just fine. After all it’s a fair reflection of the types of emails I send.
Curator Jeff Thompson Writes mailto: argues for a curatorial practice akin to chaos theory or aleatoric musical composition – that the initiation of a specific but open structure creates unexpected and diverse results. As the digital files (up until this point infinitely malleable and scalable) reach the printer, they are made manifest as fixed, physical objects; when hung on the gallery wall they each represent a small document in a curatorial process divorced from the geographically-focused perfection of the unique art object.
There is a full catalogue of the exhibition available to download as .pdf here which includes an essay by the Curator. Be warned though, the document is well over 100mb in size and you will need to skip to page 1225 to find my contribution.
