Carriage Trade

Archival Material ("doubles")

peter scott — 2010-08-15T23:37:35Z

Kickstarter

peter scott — 2010-08-15T21:43:00Z

The “rewards” (posters, catalogues, videos, archival material) for a donation to carriage trade are described below. The archival material included in carriage trade exhibitions and offered here is produced by the gallery and provides a fact-based context for the artworks in the show. Employing the formal properties of traditional exhibition presentation, the content of this material often reflects the adage “truth is stranger than fiction.”

Note: For pledge amounts of $75 (“look-a-likes”) and $175 (“doubles”) please e-mail us, your image preference and we'll do our best to accommodate you depending on availability. For the $350 pledge, the five look-a-likes are a fixed set.

Once you've made your decision, please go to our Kickstarter page to donate.

Click to enlarge

Pledge $25
“Another Green World” poster

The exhibition will include work by Betty Beaumont, Neil Jenney, Barbara Ess, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mathias Kessler, among others.

Click to enlarge

Pledge $45
“Another Green World” poster and “Mistaken Identity” catalogue

With texts by carriage trade director and curator Peter Scott, and Fred Dewey, former director of Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles.

Pledge $75
Archival Material (“look-a-likes”), 2008

From a series of “look-a-likes” of media personalities originally included in the exhibition "The Cult of Personality" at carriage trade in 2008 and Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels in 2009.

archival inkjet print, 9" x 5," framed, ed. 10

See all available pieces

Click to view trailer

Pledge $125
Diane Nerwen, Open House, 2009

Diane Nerwen's Open House, (Chapter 1: Removal) was first exhibited at carriage trade in 2008. Lengthened to a 31-minute video, Open House was recently shown at MoMA. The video presents powerful evidence of the destabilizing effects of the speculative housing boom in the Willamsburg section of Brooklyn.

video, 31-minutes

Click to enlarge

Pledge $175
Archival Material ("doubles"), 2010

Included in the exhibition “Mistaken Identity,” the series pairs an image of a politician/celebrity with an image of their possible double displayed side by side.

archival inkjet print, 10" x 10," framed, ed. 5

See all available pieces

Click to enlarge

Pledge $250
Archival Material (Diana), 2008

This image is from a newspaper article concerning a portrait of princess Diana that inspired Elton John. The article claims that Elton brought the portrait on tour and “talked to” Diana before each concert. Included in the exhibition "The Cult of Personality" at carriage trade in 2008 and Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels in 2009.

archival inkjet print, 17" x 22," unframed, ed. 10

Click to enlarge

Pledge $350
Archival Material (“look-a-likes”), 2008
set of five

From a series of “look-a-likes” of media personalities originally included in the exhibition "The Cult of Personality" at carriage trade in 2008 and Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels in 2009.

archival inkjet print, 9" x 5," framed, ed. 10

Click to enlarge

Pledge $900
Archival Material (Trigo/Osama), 2010

Shown in the exhibition “Mistaken Identity.” The image and text are derived from a letter sent to the FBI by the Spanish leftist politician Gaspar Llamazares Trigo. Trigo took issue with the FBI's use of his image in a photo composite with Osama Bin Laden's face, intending to show how Bin Laden might appear as an older man.

archival inkjet print, 18” x 24," framed, ed. 10

Pledge $1,400

One Archival Material (Trigo/Osama) piece from “Mistaken Identity.” Plus, one Archival Material (Diana) piece. Plus, a set of five Archival Material (“look-a-likes”) pieces.

peter scott — 2010-07-18T20:18:09Z

Mistaken Identity Catalogue

peter scott — 2010-06-29T18:53:25Z

Purchase a 'Mistaken Identity' catalogue with texts by
writer Fred Dewey, former director of Beyond Baroque,
Los Angeles, and carriage trade director and exhibition
curator Peter Scott.

James Siena

peter scott — 2010-06-11T20:21:47Z

For more information, please contact:
pscott carriagetrade.org

Tim Rollins and KOS

peter scott — 2010-06-11T20:21:33Z

For more information, please contact:
pscott carriagetrade.org

Vito Acconci

peter scott — 2010-06-11T20:21:22Z

For more information, please contact:
pscott carriagetrade.org

Dan Graham

peter scott — 2010-05-30T22:08:54Z

As an early example of Dan Graham's photographic work, “Two Housing Projects, New York, NY” could be seen as representative of what would become a long-term preoccupation with architecture and the city plan. The influence of minimal artists such as Donald Judd is readily apparent in the verticality of the image, as well as the “stacking” of the sets of balconies on both sides of the picture. Taken during the same period as the “Homes for America” photographs as well as text pieces such as Schema, both intended for magazine distribution, Graham's initial interest in the medium of photography came partly out of a reluctance to accept the sequestering of art within the gallery system, whose “containers” had been highlighted by minimal art's emphasis on the materiality of the art object. As part of a larger discursive practice that stretches across writing, performance, video, models and pavilions, Graham's photographs could be seen as visual “think pieces” within a medium that offers immediate responses to elements of the built environment that are symptomatic of his line of thought, and have proven highly influential on younger generations of artists who have taken up the problem of art's relationship to architecture.

For more information, please contact:
pscott carriagetrade.org

peter scott — 2010-05-18T03:23:22Z

Ronald Cotton

Incident Year: 1984
Jurisdiction: NC
Charge: Rape, Burglary
Conviction: Rape (2 cts.), Burglary (2 cts.)
Sentence: Life plus 54 Years
Year of Conviction: 1985, 1987
Exoneration Date: 6/30/95
Sentence Served: 10.5 Years
Real perpetrator found? Yes
Contributing Causes: Eyewitness Misidentification,
Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science
Compensation? Yes

From a March 10, 2009 Meredith Vieira interview on the Today Show with Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton.

VIEIRA: Jennifer, I want to go back to 1984—July 1984. You're a college student. You're raped, and you made a point that night as you were being raped to study everything you could about the person who was raping you, because you were committed, if you survived, to getting that guy. And a few days later, you identified in a lineup Ronald as the—I'm sorry—Cotton as the man who raped you. Why were you so certain it was him? Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: Well, that's just the way memory works. You know, memory takes certain visuals and oftentimes, in my case, after doing a composite sketch, that was the last visual I had in my memory. It's very sub-conscious, but when I went to the photo lineup, what I'm drawing from, from my memory, is a composite sketch. And there's six photographs in front of me, and subconsciously I'm trying to figure out the person in the photographic lineup that most closely resembles a composite sketch...
VIEIRA: That sketch.
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: ...as opposed to the actual attacker. When I went to a physical lineup several days later, again, my last visual I have is, all subconscious, is a photograph.
VIEIRA: But you had no doubt. I mean, you weren't even—there wasn't a part of you that said...
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: No.
VIEIRA: ...`this might not be the right person'?
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: No. Not at all. I was 100 percent certain. VIEIRA: So Ronald, I know you had a few run-ins with the police prior to this whole thing, and so they knew about you, but you also knew you were innocent.
Mr. COTTON: Correct.
VIEIRA: You find yourself in a trial, a week later you're convicted of rape, you're sentenced to life in prison. It had to be a nightmare for you.
Mr. COTTON: It was indeed. I just had to keep myself together, which wasn't easy at all. I was missing my family, my loved ones, but they was behind me 100 percent. So I just took it day from day and hoped that true justice would prevail and open doors for me.
VIEIRA: Well, not long after you entered prison, a new inmate came named Bobby Poole, and you took one look at him—he was in prison for rape—you took one look at him and you said `I'm serving time for that man's crime.' Why did you connect Bobby Poole with what happened to Jennifer?
Mr. COTTON: For the simple fact he resembled the composite sketch. I immediately went to my dorm, pulled out the article that I had taken with me. I compared it with Poole. I confronted Poole a couple days later and asked him.
VIEIRA: Did he do it?
Mr. COTTON: Did he commit the crime? And he denied it. But later on, as my sentence continued to be served, I ran into one of Poole's friends, and he told me that Poole confessed to him that he had me serving time for a crime he had committed upon Jennifer.
VIEIRA: So you took a picture of Poole, sent it to your lawyers. That resulted in a second trial. You're there for the second trial. You are face-to-face now with Bobby Poole...
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: Mm-hmm.
VIEIRA: ...the man who actually did rape you.
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: That's correct.
VIEIRA: You never put it together?
Ms. THOMPSON-CANNINO: No. Not at all. People have asked me that, like, `was there an aha moment when you saw him?' And no, there was not. Because now three years had gone by. Ronald Cotton was the rapist, period. That's how memory works. It's so fragile. It's so easily contaminated.

back to images

Mistaken Identity

peter scott — 2010-05-16T18:21:24Z

Dan Graham

Exploring the limits of self-consciousness and its representation, Dan Graham's mid-1970s video and performances were highly charged experiments in the ‘splitting' of the self via its reflections and representations. In Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1977, Graham adopted the no-nonsense cadence of a sportscaster as he gave a ‘play by play' account of his activity in the space between an audience and wall-sized mirror. Shifting from banal descriptions of his movements reflected in the mirror to the audience's responses, and then back again, the artist presented the dilemma of the socially constructed self as a moment-to-moment process requiring constant re-focusing. Negotiating between the social self and its representation via a running monologue which noted simple gestures and shifts in posture, the body is revealed as a somewhat cumbersome site of exchange between private experience and public expectation, alluding to the latent schizophrenia present in everyday experience.

Innocence Project

The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal clinic affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992. The project is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. Mistaken for another person and forced to answer for their actions, the wrongfully accused exist in a double limbo in which they hope for the chance to correct the governments profound error, while involuntarily maintaining the identity of the guilty party. Marvin Anderson, Ronald Cotton, Clarence Elkins, and Jerry Miller, whose cases are addressed in Mistaken Identity, are four of the 254 people who have been exonerated through DNA testing, including 17 who served time on death row. They served an average of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. Eyewitness misidentification was the single greatest cause of their wrongful convictions.

Carol Irving

Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon has become synonymous with multiple, sometimes conflicting versions of an event, presenting the narrative as a phenomenon plagued by the difficulty of determining its one true version. In the context of criminology, the need to determine the truth of an event has meant the adaptation of scientific methods, with varying results. The polygraph test, as much a part of folklore as science, has turned to the physiology of the body as a materialist means of summoning what the mind might be reluctant to reveal. In Carol Irving's PL/90-0559A, the artist makes use of the polygraph machine as way to examine her own experience of being the victim of an assault. The ensuing investigation, trial, and newspaper reportage are all contextualized via a series of questions derived from friends (personal), representatives of the state (police, lawyers, judges, etc.) and the media (journalists), which are asked of the artist during a polygraph exam. What emerges is a layered, sometimes contradictory portrait of an individual's traumatic experience reconstructed through the perspective of others. The sometimes brutal, sometimes curious, and occasionally banal questions reflect the differing relationships and attitudes toward the criminal and the victim. Presenting her own case as an archival reconstruction of a subject through the experience of a crime, PL/90-0559A reveals the intricacies and biases which the artist confronted in the complex overlapping of reactions to her traumatic experience, while offering an equally revealing account of the social make up within which the event took place.

John Schabel

Conveying the anonymity and momentary isolation characteristic of long distance travel, John Schabel's discrete portraits of passengers seen through the windows of a plane also reveal an underlying tension between public decorum and private refuge. The waiting passengers are shown in a suspended moment, paralleled by the “in-between-ness” of their identities as both individuals and members of a group. As portraits, these subjects are defined as much by their circumstances as by who they appear to be. Beyond categories of gender, race, and guesses at age and occupation, the identities of these people are up for grabs, suggesting a momentary lack of definition characteristic of being “in public.” The tension produced by the uncertainty as to who they are is exacerbated by the grainy, surveillance quality of the photographs. The viewer is compelled to join the photographer in this unsolicited observation, so that the portraits posses a quality of suspense somewhat like film noir, but because of the passive nature of the subject matter, the tension is far more subdued. Wavering back and forth in the process of travel, the identity of the passenger is in constant flux, as patterns determined by personal behaviors are at moments lost in or subsumed by the crowd. Isolating passengers in a moment of down time, these images describe the thin border between the specificity of one's personal nature and the anonymity of the unrecognized, public self.

Karen Yama

The disembodied voices of dubbed film actors exist in a kind of netherworld. As they try to lay claim to the actor's identities on the screen they must deny the obvious, (cowboys and Indians did not speak German) while attempting to convey the right fit for the character they portray to achieve “authenticity.” Like a sophisticated from of karaoke, this duplicity tends to interrupt the seamless nature of film as it claims temporary ownership over the original production. In Karen Yama's Their Hier double-sided portraits of the three principle actors in "The Shining" are placed on a shelf in front of a mirror, with Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall, and Danny Lloyd facing out towards the viewer and the reflections of the normally invisible actors who provide the German voices for their characters visible as reflections. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of the underlying terror implicit in the use of a mirror in this context, Yama's two sets of unstable portraits appear to inhabit each other, as each manufactured persona vies for authenticity against its perpetual double.

The Yes Men

Producing fake websites, impersonating PR representatives, and making up products that test the limits of even the most cynical free-market ideologue, the Yes Men's appropriation of corporate identities question the blind faith placed in officialdom within polite society. Exploiting the seamlessness of our belief in the daily repetition of established truths, their pranks ape the delivery of these truths while adding a common sense element that renders them absurd. Through penetrating the tightly managed information mechanisms of mass media and business culture, they managed to breach, however fleetingly, the steady drumbeat of business-as-usual, which gradually immunizes members of the population into tacit acceptance of routine destruction and pillage on behalf of a “healthy” economy. Impersonating a Dow Chemical spokesperson on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster, which killed thousands and injured over one hundred thousand, Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum appeared on the BBC under the name Jude Finisterra and claimed that Dow would accept “full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe.” As the parent company of Union Carbide, Finesterra claimed that Dow had resolved to liquidate “this nightmare for the world and this headache for Dow, and use the $12 billion to provide more than $500 per victim, which is all that they have seen. A maximum of just about $500 per victim. It is not ‘plenty good for an Indian' as one of our spokespersons unfortunately said a couple of years ago.” The stock market backlash was instant, as Dow shares lost $2 billion in value in 23 minutes, recovering their losses later the same day when the interview was identified as a hoax. The worldwide media response brought attention to the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster that, according to Bichlbaum, is usually ignored in the U.S.

back to Mistaken Identity page

Mistaken Identity page