Gordon Bleach Scrypt photographs

The photographs are from Scrypt, an ongoing project that writes and stages the archive - 'memory building' in a double sense. Initially housed in the Library of the Rochester Institute of Technology during its major expansion (1989-91), Scrypt addressed the procedures by which an archive and its material structure are fabricated. The images displayed here record small geographic and architectural pathologies (building walks, spurious artifacts) performed on the construction site. Long exposures of up to an hour were used to question the self-evident immediacy of photographic documentation. Since the aberrational structures were traced, built, dismantled and returned during exposure, they are only partially legible in the final images. Furthermore, the archivist-builder appears blurred to the point of invisibility. Library construction eventually shuttered and entombed what remained of the scenes and their spray-painted inscriptions. The spurious artifacts are now dispersed across the official building and the borrowed materials encrypted in their proper place.These photographs document the construction but are also a work of art as well in that the artist painted words on the building and used lasers to draw in the photos.

The project was a fulfillment of Mr. Bleach's Masters in Fine Arts thesis at RIT in 1994. Link to the artists' thesis: http://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6375&context=theses