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Derivative and Not Without Dysfunction engages the spatial lexicon of the contemporary art apparatus—its institutions, infrastructures, and mediating architectures. This ongoing collage series traverses the built environments of galleries, museums, and foundations, not merely as containers of aesthetic experience but as active agents in the circulation, codification, and even distortion of visual culture. Working with photographic detritus, typographic palimpsests, and the textured residues of institutional design, the series reflects on the recursive condition of the image-as-citation—where each visual fragment reverberates with echoes of prior representations. In this recursive ecology, representation functions not as origin but as iteration, foregrounding derivation as both methodological tactic and symptomatic trace. Here, architecture is not neutral—it is an ideological scaffold. The work interrogates how visual art is not only housed within but constituted by the architectural and spatial regimes of the city’s art infrastructure. It attends to the subtle frictions where art attempts to exceed its framing—whether by dissolving into the white cube’s seamless continuity or by jarring against the rationalist grids of cultural display. The project asks: when visual languages are embedded in architectures of exhibition, what legibilities are privileged—and what are obscured? At what point does art’s insertion into these spatial and functional systems enact a misalignment—a productive dysfunction—against the teleologies of clarity, utility, or institutional coherence? By operating at the interstice of image, text, and structure, Derivative and Not Without Dysfunction posits dysfunction not as breakdown, but as a critical aperture—an opening toward reimagining how aesthetic forms circulate through and against the architectures that purport to contain them.
