Morphologies
Law Warschaw Gallery / St. Paul, MN USA
26 August - 15 December 2024
Plains Art Museum / Fargo, ND USA
18 January - 25 May 2025
Eisentrager-Howard Gallery / Lincoln, NE USA
2 September - 26 October 2025
Mickey Smith is a master chronicler of libraries, having turned her camera to these repositories of knowledge for over twenty years. Her prolific series explore the life cycles of library collections and the labor of those who steward them. Morphologies presents Smith’s insights through work from her long-form documentary Volume, highlights from her projects As You Will, Believe You Me and Denudation, as well as new works created during her two-year residency at Macalester College’s DeWitt Wallace Library.
Together, these works call on us to consider our evolving relationships with books as monuments of memory and culture. How might our perceptions shift when the magazines we regularly recycle are bound to become colorful, stoic books? How might we feel when those tomes eventually end up recycled themselves? From medieval chained libraries to artificial intelligence, Smith’s work explores the many processes that shape the institutions of our collective memory.
Curated by Heather Everhart / Installation images by Rik Sferra
Platform Vol. 1, 2024 (interactive floor of 3,276 bound periodicals)
Platform Vol. I (detail of interactive floor of 3,276 bound periodicals)
Collocation No. 19 (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)
“Deaccessioning is a sustainable, ethical practice. While dealing with physical materials, and even presenting material objects in the form of deaccessioned tomes, Smith alludes to the physical and digital preservation challenges faced by cultural heritage professionals of the twenty-first century.
Similarly to Shannon Mattern’s work, the Morphologies exhibition serves as a call for critical librarianship and further community engagement with the practices that occur “behind the scenes” at our own institutions. As Mattern writes, “authority is constructed and contextual, and…knowledge is not pure and nonpartisan.” Therefore, libraries must change in accordance with the needs of their communities. A library may be a sanctuary, but it is not a mausoleum.”
— Aisling Quigley
Stack Vol. 1 (National Geographic 1914-2012), 2024
“If you search National Geographic today, the first result that comes up is not National Geographic the magazine, but National Geographic the television network. A simple, yet somehow surprising example of the way in which we consume information has evolved over time. I chose to work with National Geographic in Stack I as it is an iconic, globally recognized periodical. During my childhood, it was the only connection from Duluth, Minnesota to the rest of the world—including New Zealand, where I live now. In the pages of the magazine were images of wartime, famine and space, images and ideas which have become definitive of the 20th century. I doubt I read the articles, but those long form photographic studies are burnt into my memory. Subconsciously, was it one of the reasons I chose photography? Is National Geographic why I wanted to grow up to travel the world with a camera in hand?
The internet has pushed the magazine into extinction; there is no next generation of readers as the information they consume takes ten thousand different forms. Anyone can Google Earth their way into any corner of the globe from a handheld device. We no longer need to depend on National Geographic as our only window to the world.”
— Mickey Smith
