Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, The Golden USB, 2014-ongoing. multi-media installation.
Through spoken-word audio, filmed performances and specimens, contents of the Trade Catalogue of Everything are revealed. Displayed as objects of appropriation and speculation, these are samples from a USB-ready “commercial” list addressed to extraterrestrial beings.
With reference to NASA’s 1977 Voyager Golden Record, The Golden USB (on view through December 3, 2017) captures land, water, air, plants, animals, and fragments of nature, along with human culture, industry, and invention. In considering the prospect of interstellar trade, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens raise timely questions about the limits of commodification, including the ownership of the Earth and its life forms. This exhibition is curated by Sunny Kerr, Curator of Contemporary Art.
The collaborative duo Ibghy and Lemmens is the inaugural Stonecroft Foundation Artist-in-Residence, hosted in collaboration with Queen’s Film and Media. The artists visited Kingston for research and production phases, beginning in mid-March. They have collected “entries” from a diverse group of artists, technicians, poets and scholars to create this new Canada-focused chapter of their ongoing project. In early September and mid-October, they will return to Kingston to elaborate on the exhibition’s themes.
A publication will follow the exhibition in winter 2018, reflecting Ibghy and Lemmens’s oeuvre to-date and feature essays by Lorna Brown and Sunny Kerr.