Curators: Erica Seccombe & Alison Munro
The humble photocopier has perhaps five faculties that define its soul, its relationship to the world and its utility to human beings. Most obviously, there is its capacity to multiply the number of copies of something; secondly, its capacity to enlarge or reduce, with consequent losses of resolution; thirdly, its enslavement to entropy and the inevitable decay of an image through repeated copying; fourthly, its capacity to be used as a kind of camera, an idea that gets a regular outing as an office prank but is otherwise rarely appreciated; and fifthly, its own brute, stupid existence, as an object that is often both hulking and beige (an unsettling combination), and whose frailties include paper jams, lack of toner, and an incapacity to interpret simple instructions.
The exhibition Place original face down to copy was conceived as a tribute to the photocopier as an artistic medium and as an art-making tool. Bringing together twenty-four artists from a range of media-painting, photography, sculpture, performance, print media and drawing-curators Erica Seccombe and Alison Munro required each of the participating artists to use photocopy technology at some stage in the creative process. The point of the exercise was not to strike a claim for the photocopier's legitimacy as tool or medium (this was taken as a given), but to use it to explore issues such as the nature of the multiple, the proliferation and consumption of information, the problem of distortion in the communication process, and the instability and mutability of meaning.
Bernie Slater's The Consumer Sedation Committee's Colouring-In Competition gave gallery visitors an opportunity to unleash their creativity, providing a table, chairs, dozens of coloured pencils and felt markers, and a