Angela Welyczko
BFA Photography (Honours), College of Fine Arts, Sydney
The instinct to preserve runs deep within us all. While it can affect some of us more than others, the act of collecting, storing and archiving has been, and always will be, common practice. Our instinct to preserve is not only about holding onto the past, but it also reflects our need to lay in stock for the future.
Storage Space: Inside the Archive explores collecting and storing at a public and institutional level. The work encompasses both the archive and the stored collection, showing the differences and revealing the complexities, idiosyncrasies and reasons for being. Within this investigation, the study of the archive becomes a device for a broader study of the human condition, specifically, our fear of mortality, our human bias, and our fear of loss.
These close-up portraits of various shelves within twenty-one archives in Sydney function as physical and symbolic cross-sections. They show what is inside the archive – a representative sample of the whole, but yet do not provide any access to the information within. They are typological works, existing as a collection of collections – an archive of archives. These images may one day serve not so much as a document of how things were, but as a monument to how information at the institutional level was once stored.
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