Conditional Report (2012)
This site-specific project was commissioned by the curators of the first exhibition, Archival Dialogues, at the new Ryerson Image Centre that ran from September 29 – December 16, 2012. "Conditional Report" was a reconstruction of the rough climate-controlled structure built in an art storage warehouse in the suburbs of Toronto in which the Black Star Photo Collection - founding collection of the RIC - was housed for a several years .
It was intentionally installed - "awkwardly" in the words of one astute critic - in the foyer of the RIC, meant to act as an inconvenient physical reminder of the literal and figurative journey of the collection and its contents from New York where it existed from the end of WWII as a functional press photography service to a warehouse in Scarborough to now serving new purposes as a researchable archive at at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in Canada.
Both ends of the structure functioned as rear projection screens where one could watch at one end, a grid of videos depicting the construction of the RIC itself, all of original sites of the Black Star Collection in New York and Berlin and the construction of the installation work itself. At the other end, the process of transforming the analogue images into digital documents and the destruction of exhibition copy prints was featured.
