Micah Lexier
Touch Paper Once (details), 2008
installation

» Bureau de change
» Radio Free Banff

Bureau de change, Archive

Touch Paper Once: Selected Documents from the Walter Phillips Gallery Archive 1976 – 2007

The exhibition project Bureau de change, celebrating The Banff Centre 75th Anniversary, features a commissioned work by Toronto artist Micah Lexier. The Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition archives serve as inspiration and primary material for Lexier’s quasi-archive installation. The artist selected 170 documents from the Gallery’s history spanning over 30 years. Items were selected and organized according to his interest in specific graphic sensibilities and conceptual criteria; he was drawn to such qualities as photocopy degradation, idiosyncratic handwriting, simple line drawings, and obscure markings. Lexier has established categories such as “call and response” and “signature” to present the material in sympathetic associations arranged on tables. Text identifying each entry and where it was found offers clues to the histories contained in this material and to the artist’s reasons for his idiosyncratic selection of documents that might normally be considered irrelevant for official records. The surprising combinations of Lexier’s assemblage of handwritten letters, faxes, photographs, floor plans, even the backs of envelopes celebrate the intricacies and often unseen processes of exhibition production.