GALLERY TAKEOVER: Abstract Land & Filing Co.
Abstract Land & Filing Co.
MORGAN ASHCOM
Friday, September 6 – Saturday, October 26, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION | Friday, September 6, from 5-7 pm
Candela Gallery is thrilled to announce a gallery takeover by Charlottesville, Virginia-based artist and community organizer Morgan Ashcom. Titled the Abstract Land & Filing Co. (ALFC), this exhibition will be Ashcom’s second at Candela, continuing to showcase his love for parafiction and collaboration.
Since 2018, Ashcom has operated his studio practice out of an industrial warehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. At one time, employees at this commercial building manufactured products for the analog data industry, commonly referred to as the visible records industry. While the factory is no longer in operation, Ashcom has spent the past seven years reimagining this property to feature a community-directed commons and art space called Visible Records, nestled within a constellation of blue-collar workers.
Conceived as a fictional company, ALFC serves as a unique artistic repository for Ashcom's work, exploring the intersections of private property, big data, and industrial remnants. By utilizing discarded factory materials such as card trays, filing cabinets, and pocket frames, Ashcom blends archival images with contemporary photographs of the visible records and land management industries. The ALFC challenges and reconsiders the colonial notion that the power to describe equates to the power to control and invites new ways of imagining our relationships to one another.
In addition to a display from the company archives, the ALFC’s takeover will highlight Richmond community initiatives challenging capitalist notions of land use. Through an interactive community-based collaboration, ALFC has partnered with Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, MADRVA, and RVA Community Fridges. Folks are encouraged to invite other co-ops and radical land-based initiatives in the Richmond area for inclusion in a series of community-generated scrapbooks for each collective.
Please click the button below to upload a photo you’ve taken that relates to one of these initiatives! If you have a Richmond area initiative that might be interested in participating, please email info@candelabooks.com to have them added to the list.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Morgan Ashcom (b. Charlottesville, 1982) multidisciplinary artworks and books explore the tension between fiction, myth and lived experience in the context of imperialism. Ashcom's work has been exhibited and published across the globe. He has received numerous awards including the German Photobook and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Purchase Prize. His work has been featured in Le Monde, The Brooklyn Rail, Jewish Currents, and The British Journal of Photography.
Ashcom is a former faculty of Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, the University of Hartford, Cornell University, and the University of Virginia. He is also the Founding Director of Visible Records. He currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA.
ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS
Mutual Aid Distribution Richmond (MADRVA) or Richmond Mutual Aid is a solidarity network of community members and organizations that operate collectively and primarily work to redistribute food, hygiene items, cleaning supplies, and other vital goods.
The Maggie Walker Community Land Trust honors Maggie L. Walker, a visionary leader, and her legacy in the city of Richmond. In her name, MWCLT works to ensure that the communities of the Richmond metropolitan region are diverse and inclusive, with safe, attractive, affordable, and sustainable housing choices for all people.
RVA Community Fridges is a mutual aid group combating food insecurity throughout and around Richmond, Virginia.
ABOUT VISIBLE RECORDS
Visible Records is an artist-run gallery and community space located in Charlottesville, VA. We seek to provide central Virginians with studio membership, exhibition & community organizing space, artist residencies, and programming, with a focus on compelling contemporary arts and building community power.