Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy

On View: September 25 - December 18, 2021

Main Galleries

Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy, features seven artists who explore, co-opt, and challenge bureaucratic systems and structures. They highlight the human impact of bureaucratic institutions, from the professional relationships between artists and arts organizations, to the obscure workings of financial systems, to the violent and deadly consequences wrought by global empires.

To most, art and bureaucracy couldn’t be more distant. The traditional perception of Western art imagines it as a transcendent escape offering beauty, inspiration, and a departure from the mundane. Bureaucracy conjures the opposite reaction, mired by stagnation, inflexibility, and the complexity of large, hierarchical institutions. Take a Number challenges these rigid preconceptions, presenting artists who use the tools of bureaucracy––including archival research, photography, digital technology, and paperwork––and projects that explore bureaucracy’s methodologies and its failures, both banal and catastrophic.

Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy was curated by Blair Murphy, AAC’s curator of exhibitions and features seven local and national artists including:


Sobia Ahmad (Washington, DC)
Sobia Ahmad’s work looks at notions of nationhood, home, and heritage, in an installation that draws on her own family history, including her grandmother’s experience of forced migration during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.


Maura Brewer (Los Angeles, CA)
In the film-noir influenced video Private Client Services, artist Maura Brewer learns how to launder money, delving into the intricacies and loopholes of the financial system and highlighting the use of art objects as vehicles to obscure the source of dubiously acquired funds.

Chris Combs (Washington, DC)
In the installation DataWorld 2021, booth #313: Maelstrom Networks, Inc., an array of Chris Combs’ interactive sculptures mimics the increasingly ubiquitous technological surveillance that surrounds us.


Evan Hume (South Bend, IN)
Evan Humes’ series Viewing Distance utilizes declassified material from United States government archives, highlighting photography’s use as a tool for reconnaissance and surveillance and the way these military and intelligence uses shaped the development of photographic technology in the 20th century.


Stephanie Mercedes (Washington, DC)
Stephanie Mercedes explores the relationship between artists and institutions through the lens of artist contracts. These documents introduce legalistic and bureaucratic language into the relationship between artists and organizations, but also make visible pre-existing power dynamics and can be used by artists as a tool to protect their own interests and navigate their relationship to institutions and the art market.


R.L. Martens (Lexington, KY)
R.L. Martens’ Material Witness mines our relationship to waste through idiosyncratic research into the history of a specific stretch of land in Lorton, VA that has housed landfills, brick works, a prison, and, most recently, a mixed-use development project. Through the collection of archival newspaper clippings, contemporary YouTube videos, landfill design literature, and material remnants from the location, Martens unearths a largely hidden history of the site.


Pau S. Pescador (Los Angeles, CA)
An artist and government worker, Pau S. Pescador created the video series PSA based on extensive conversations with other government employees and members of the public. Through a combination of interview clips, animations, and their own first-person narration, Pescador explores the challenges, possibilities, disappointments, and frustrations of building and sustaining a responsive system of governance.


RELATED EVENTS

Take a Number: Maura Brewer and Casey Michel
Wednesday / November 3 / 7pm EST / 4pm PST

Take a Number: Chris Combs and Evan Hume
Wednesday / November 10 / 6pm EST / 3pm PST

Take a Number: Sobia Ahmad and R.L. Martens
Thursday / November 18 / 6pm EST / 3pm PST
This virtual event is free but registration is required. Register here.

Take a Number: Stephanie Mercedes and Pau S. Pescador
Saturday / November 20 / 4pm EST / 1pm PST
This virtual event is free but registration is required. Register here.

 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Press Release

Take a Number Exhibition Catalog

Call for Artists

Submit your work for a chance to be exhibited

Support the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington

Make a Donation

Artist Talks with Andrew Barco and Elliot Doughtie

Saturday / October 21 / 1pm-3pm

Join artists Andrew Barco and Elliot Doughtie for conversations about their solo exhibitions currently on view at MoCA Arlington.

Neon Nights: Gala & Silent Auction

Wednesday / September 27 / 7pm

Join us on Wednesday, September 27 for a special gala and silent auction to benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Tickets range from $250 to $500 and include a 3-course dinner, silent auction, and the joy you’ll feel knowing you’re supporting the museum! Can’t attend? Consider sponsoring an artist to attend in your place!

MoCA on the Move at Met Park

Sundays 10am-12pm

MoCA Arlington at Met Park
Fun for the whole family! No Experience Required offers playful art making activities for children (and their curious adults) every Sunday morning. There will be collaborative, community-built art works, and opportunities to “make and take” works, too.

CLOSE