Morgan Ashcom is a photographer, certainly, but his projects, installations, and conceptual work expand beyond the camera.
For his photographic book “What the Living Carry” he invented a small Southern town called Hoy’s Fork and through staged photos, typewritten letters and his own memories of growing up in small town Virginia, crafted a mysterious history that explored relationships between people and their built and natural environments. Another project of his is Visible Records, an artist-run gallery, art studio, activist, and gathering space in Charlottesville focused on “building community power.” Ashcom is a photographer, but he’s also a storyteller, an archivist, and a community builder.
For “Abstract Land & Filing Co.,” his installation on view at Candela Books + Gallery until Oct. 26, he brings all of these roles together and then some. The piece explores the relationships that form in, around, and despite work; specifically, the relationships between companies and the communities in which they reside, between workers and the machines they operate, between the land and neighbors (both human and not) that surround places of work.
Ashcom has filled three of Candela’s rooms with artifacts of work – the installation is an art show, but it feels like an archeological dig. On the walls hang blown-up color photographs of machines, enlarged blueprints, schematics, dot matrix printouts. Sometimes these materials are collaged together with 3D objects that look like the inside dividers of old-fashioned wooden desk drawers. Sometimes they appear embedded in pieces of an old business directory printed on card stock. I imagine a long-gone secretary meticulously maintaining the phone numbers and addresses. What strikes me the most is the extreme forgettability of the company names on the lists — Patterson Business Systems, Perry Corporation, Office Dimensions, Northwest Business Systems. It’s a great representation of the boredom, soullessness and almost anti-creativity of what so much work is.
In the middle of the first room sits a steel punch-card time clock and several dangling sculptures made of bound dried flowers, heavy denim work aprons, garlands of nails and other building materials. One piece near the front of the room incorporates a tube that’s continuously blowing air how an industrial fan might be built into a machine to cool its components.
It became clear as I walked through it all, that I was surrounded by fabricated and authentic evidence — the printouts and lists of number look bureaucratic enough to be real, some of the photographs look snatched straight from the 1960s, but others could have been taken yesterday. If it’s evidence, what is it evidence of? What company left a cabinet of yellowed, rolled-up floor plans behind? Whose aprons are these? What exactly do these machines do?
These are my first questions. They’re obvious, probably banal and they’re never answered— at least not specifically. But after some time sifting through Ashcom’s collection of ephemera, a kind of answer begins to form. “Abstract Land & Filing Co.” is every company, every business, everywhere I’ve ever worked and punched a clock, updated a file, swept a floor, peered into a room of stiff bosses circling a table.
I recognize the common (universal?) trappings of wage work. The regulatory demands of the time clock. People operating the cranks and levers of machines as naturally as they move their own limbs (in one photo a man appears to feed a sheet of paper into a machine with his mouth). A cut-up photograph of trees is pieced back together so as to resemble a view through the panes of a window — think of the particular dazed boredom one feels after completing hours of repetitive tasks. Work, Ashcom seems to be saying, is one of our culture’s most common denominators.
Central to the experience of this installation is Ashcom’s collaboration with several of Richmond’s mutual aid co-ops, D.I.Y. spaces, and radical land-based groups. In the second room, a table is piled with papers and folders and signs inviting viewers to add photos and ephemera to scrapbooks (future archives) for groups like RVA Community Fridges, the music venue, OSB, Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, and other hyperlocal organizations.
It’s an adjustment to move from Ashcom’s amorphous, fictional ur-company to these real, community centered, human-first spaces. It’s almost a confrontation, and I found myself needing to personally reconcile the difference between my wage work, my reality of trading my labor for money, with the reality of these spaces and co-ops that operate in a different mode entirely. A group like RVA Community Fridges installs refrigerators around the city stocked with fresh food for our neighbors, for anyone who needs it. It’s a mutual aid group with care and health at its center. It is not a company or business; it eschews profit, it isn’t interested in maximizing efficiency. Maggie Walker Land Trust is a land bank that secures tax delinquent and otherwise abandoned city properties for community use and affordable housing. It is governed collaboratively, upholds shared values of transparency and equitable development. It is not a company interested in dominating the housing market or developing land to enrich a few entrepreneurs.
There are different ways to do things, different ways to work. There are ways to feed ourselves and our neighbors, to own land, to support art-making that aren’t based on exchanging our time for dollars. Ashcom’s installation ends on this liberatory note. “Abstract Land & Filing Co.” is here to inspire and value and celebrate these alternative ways to work, to remind us that work doesn’t have to be taxing, degrading, mindless, and lonely.
Work can be in the business of raising us all up together.
Morgan Ashcrom’s Abstract Land and Filing Co. runs at Candela Books + Gallery through Oct. 26.
