The Archive of Desire

An exhibition with performances by RWU Adjunct VARTS Faculty, Amy Walsh
December 4 - 21, 2012

From Amy:
"I am excited to be exhibiting and performing at Brown University in December, as a followup to my fellowship last year at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Feel free the share this with students - there are opportunities for visitors to participate heavily in the goings-on and many of them will get a kick out of it. I involved my sculpture students in the project for one class (as part of a small unit on participatory artmaking) and it was quite stimulating for them.

Cheers,

Amy"

The Archive of Desire is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project by artist Amy Walsh exploring visionary imagination in everyday life, collective production of stories, and utopia as process. At the heart of the project is a card catalog archiving people's ideas and wishes for a future society written one by one on index cards.  For this exhibition Amy will perform a process called Listening to the Future, in which she ritually invokes a complex imaginary new world by recording ideas on index cards for over 24 hours during the course of the exhibition. Visitors may participate by observing the ideas as they are produced and projected on the walls of the gallery space, contributing to the Archive itself, or influencing Amy's thinking by offering either inspirations or conundrums as she works.

With individuals and groups, Amy facilitates the production of ideas and images that transform or transcend dominant cultural stories about the future (that it will be more of the same, or either an apocalyptic disaster or a technological utopia), and cultivates creative practices which explore the role of imagination and story in shaping reality.

Performances:
Friday, December 7, 9am - 5pm
Friday December 14, 9am - 5pm

And on a spontaneous basis!

Feel free to bring a conundrum or an inspiration, on paper, to the performances. They will go into a box that Amy will draw from throughout the performances to influence her thinking.

Exhibit Hours
Monday - Friday, 9am - 6pm

John Nicholas Brown Center
Carriage House Gallery
Brown University
357 Benefit Street

Providence, RI
free and open to the public