


On view thru November 28, 2010, the exhibition at the Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, presents an installation of the Belgium-based organization, Agency, alongside a series of photographs by Miriam Böhm.
Agency, the invention of Kobe Matthys, serves as a platform for highly systematic investigations that make formal inquiry into issues of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property. Existing as a compendium amassed and catalogued by Matthys, Agency gathers facts, subjects, objects, collectives, humans and non-humans to perform speculations and conduct Agency’s exhibitions. In this installation, titled Assembly, Agency displays evidence for the copyright infringement of a certain artist’s renderings of Place des Terreaux – Fontaine Bartholdi et Hôtel de Ville, wherein dubious distribution was enacted. “Thing 001408 (Lyone (Rhône)” bears witness in the Front Room, as testament to the problematic events that take place in the realm of artistic property.
Miriam Böhm, Berlin-based artist, presents a series of recent photographs that, like Agency’s Assembly, demonstrate shifting events of perspective. Böhm’s process begins with photographing marble slabs and faux marble paintings, followed by staging the prints against a textured backdrop, which she then re-photographs – producing a different image altogether. The work emerges, much like the marble slab itself, as a layered tablet of materiality – a compression of pictorial illusion, revealing the limitations of representation.
Image Credits:
Agency & Miriam Böhm, Installation in The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2010. Photos by Alex Elmestad.




Artist and former New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN) student Stan Chisholm recently led a NAN workshop. During the workshop, Stan introduced the students to a collaborative project he has been working on for the past year. Called MoneyBags, the project “reevaluates wealth, worth and currency.”

store in the Delmar Loop area—pulling behind it a wreckage of a car that was bombed in Baghdad in 2007. Visiting St. Louis were Artist Jeremy Deller who conceived of the project, Jonathan Harvey (an Iraq war veteran and recently demobilized Psychological Operations platoon sergeant), and Esam Pasha (an Iraqi refugee, artist, and former translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad). Also on the trip were Nato Thompson from Creative Time, Benjamin Brown (documentary extraordinaire) and Lonnie Cooper (road manager). They provided a forum
where they encouraged unrehearsed discussions about Iraq in a non partisan open atmosphere. It was great to see active soldiers currently serving our country engage in discussions about the present circumstance and the future of Iraq. More can be read about on their excellent
500 A4 photocopies, blank side out, he began to fire off an improvised narrative, dropping single sheets on the ground as if turning pages in a book. The result was a kind of vertiginous autobiography, told through stream-of-consciousness fragments, anecdotes, mappings, and repeat descriptions. Moving from Japan to Berlin, Tris pulled us through an abstracted landscape and personal history, which ended, very simply, with a conclusion that the story, however labrynthian and interconnected, could never be complete.