The Center for Ongoing Research & Projects

Reproduction Request (Half Letter)

Robert Beckman / Kate Bonner / Dante Carlos & ROLU / Munro Galloway / Nicholas Gottlund / Jessica Mallios / Ken Nurenberg / Ed Steck

January 10th – February 7th

COR&P is housed in a former shipping and receiving office that was once adjacent to the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad tracks. Our location in the middle of the country, away from coastal art centers, means that most of our audience only experiences our projects through reproductions– either in our publications or as images circulating on the internet. This sets up an unintended hierarchy that privileges proximity and direct experience, but we recognize that the mediated experience is now the more common way of experiencing art and exhibitions and has its own particular, interesting effects. Taking inspiration from COR&P’s original use, we would like to question this relationship of proximity, distance, and mediation. We have organized a series of small group shows that investigate reproduction as a form, and the various modes of dissemination and circulation for a given format under the title “Reproduction Request”. This project affords artists, curators, writers, and designers the opportunity to think about how particular artworks either lend themselves to duplication and dissemination or actively resist and disrupt easy reproduction. There will be no installation; the work in the shows will exist only as reproductions. The catalog is the show is the catalog.

The first exhibition takes the form of a half-sized photocopied booklet or “zine.” Each artist has created a page or a sequence of pages examining the intrinsic qualities of the black toner on office paper, half-sized, and stapled: the visual flattening and leveling, sequential order of pages, a small and portable size, and the ability to cheaply and easily reproduce the booklet endlessly.

Each catalog will be photocopied on demand. The exhibition booklet will be available by sending stamps for return postage in the mail or locally by visiting the COR&P office during open hours for the duration of the show, where a xerox machine will be installed. During this time, COR&P space will return to its original use as a shipping/receiving station: receiving orders and visitors, and distributing books.

This show is meant to be photocopied and redistributed by the viewer. Send correct postage* to: