Baba Yaga

Tristan Schipa & Bruno Munari

June 26, 2021

Baba Yaga is thrilled to present PHOTOTAXI, an installation of xerox works by Tristan Schipa & Bruno Munari.
Open from June 26th, 2021 to July 30th, 2021 at 5821 NY-9G.

In 1963, Bruno Munari began experimenting with photocopiers, creating the first examples of what he would come to call 'xerography.' A prolific artist whose contributions spanned a litany of fields within visual arts and beyond, Munari was interested in expanding the practices of image making, and in finding new formal possibilities in emerging technologies. The act of dragging an image along the photocopier's laser while it was in motion, for example, could produce a kind of visual stretching, a glitch that Munari played with until his technique reached a point of virtuosity. In 1969, a year before he would offer a Xerox machine to the public in a makeshift Xerography laboratory at the Venice Biennale, Munari produced the work on display at Baba Yaga; an image of a race car whose middle is stretched -a possible allusion to his early involvement in Futurism, a movement that championed acceleration and technology, and that, by the time he made this work, he had disavowed for its relation to fascism.

Tristan Schippa was born in 1985; Munari,1907. And yet the Xerox holds the same radical potentiality for Tristan as it seems to have held for Munari. Drawn to the general accessibility of the photocopier, as well as the formal flexibility and immediacy it offers, Schippa maintains a practice that can take place as easily at FedEx or Kinkos, as in his studio. His work involves a kind of hyper map-making, creating composite images based on his local surroundings, utilizing digital photography, xerox enlargements, occasionally satellite imagery, sometimes supplemented by images found online, which are then integrated into the landscapes, all of which are physically printed and collaged with transparent tape, glue, or whatever is available to him at the time.

Both of the artists in PHOTOTAXI believe(d) that Xerox machines have a potential to liberate both the image and the artist from stagnation via immediate, tactile decision making, and through the processes made possible by the 'misuse' of the photocopier -the surprising, unintended effects of experimentation.

Special thanks to: Jenni Crain and Kaufman Repetto gallery.