Archives by Artists. Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario. December 19, 2023 – October 4, 2024. Curated by DisplayCult (Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick)

Artists creating archives – or at least, artwork that resembles archives – is a well-documented phenomenon. Countless artists have explored archival themes in the decades before and after art theorist Hal Foster identified the “archival impulse” in artistic practice. On the archival side of things, numerous authors have written about artists and archives, including in several exhibition reviews in Archivaria over the years. Archives by Artists is an exhibition in a related vein. It functions as a playful infiltration of the archival reading room by art curators – an effort to bring the art world into the archives and to leverage the apparatus of the reading room for aesthetic effect. The exhibition features 13 projects by 18 artists, displayed in eight tabletop vitrines in the Alexander Fraser Reading Room, the main public research space of the Archives of Ontario (AO). Although centrally located near the main entrance of the room, the vitrines blend in with the room’s many desks and tables, reflecting an understated approach to installation. (The exhibition was deliberately not installed in the Archives’ purpose-built Helen McClung Exhibit Area, where the shows tend to be educational offerings geared toward a general audience, with interpretive texts and graphics that conform to conventional museum practices.) This display strategy gives rise to an interesting tension, since archival and curatorial approaches may be somewhat at odds in their attitudes toward the space of the reading room. Like archivists at many institutions, the staff of the AO tries to thoughtfully mitigate the administrative and security conventions of the reading room, which might feel like cultural barriers to new researchers. In contrast, the curators expressed enthusiasm for the apparatus of the reading room as a desirable part of the look and feel of the show. From their perspective, the context of the provincial archival institution adds a “gravitas” to the show that it might not have in the setting of an art gallery. The artworks in the show are grouped according to themes that articulate their “archival” nature, such as autobiography, the archive as conceptual process, and fictional archives. Although the works represent a diversity of modes of engagement with archival ideas, they also share certain generic conventions. Most obviously, they are almost all examples of artists’ multiples, a distinct but multifarious genre of artistic creation characteristically created in editions and valued at relatively accessible prices in the contemporary art market. Multiples can vary from small, discrete objects to larger and more complex assemblages that invite intellectual and literal/physical unpacking. The works featured in the show are all on the more physically complex end of the scale, and all “appropriate the look and feel of the archive,” to use the curators’ phrase – meaning that they tend to consist of printed documents, photographs, and other material contained in boxes or portfolios, perhaps with some internal envelopes or other enclosures. Archivists and archival researchers might well share the curators’ enthusiasm for artworks that come neatly contained and invite tactile exploration, revealing their full nature only through the process of being opened up and read or viewed. There is insufficient space here to engage with all 13 works in the show, so this brief review will use three examples to provide a sense of the variety of approaches and themes. Vietnamese-born international artist Danh Vo’s BlauOrange Preis (2007) resembles a small personal fonds including copies of snapshots, news clippings, postcards, and correspondence contained in a humble-looking brown cardboard dossier. The form of the archive allows for a fragmentary, heteroglossic life narrative that aptly reflects the experiences of displacement and migration of the artist, who left …