Can These Antiques Ever Prove Dangerous Again?
by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen

In Can These Antiques Ever Prove Dangerous Again? Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen present a precisely photocopied, slightly over-exposed collection of miniature protest signs. A staccato stream of proposals, phrases, and foreign ideas are set in the bezel of traditional forms; and they all ask the same co-opted question –– a question that genuinely approaches notions of obsolescence, ineffectiveness, smallness, slowness. We like these four things because they invite contemplation, allow for the circuitous re that occurs in re-cognition, re-configuration, re-making.

The traditional picket works on us differently than a barrage of tweets. The remnant of hand lettering and the literal handle are important. A photocopy has a more committed presence than a re-blog, though they both remind us that someone believed in something enough to call for its multiplication and dissemination. The screen is not a page, scrolling is not pagination, ink is not the same as light or lack thereof. Photocopied texts circulate, their legibility decaying in teeming black and white spots, dog-eared and with increasing contrast. Signage, pickets, posters, these homegrown ideological adverts index a deep-seated desire to convey, to belong, and to be identified by a sense of belief.

Feel free to request an unbound copy to experiment with the innumerable ways of reconfiguration. Shuffle and arrange through the future or codify a unique order by binding the pages according to your own internal melody.