Document. Document. Document.

The serial enunciation of Document. Document. Document. invokes the emergent, multiple, and malleable forms and persistent, if amendable, afterlives of documents that prefigure, accelerate, unsettle, and invariably influence and guide the unfolding of thesis-based research.

The evocative ideas and issues in this exhibition represent, and also question, a discursive epistemology of the document that exists restively, yet consequentially in the disciplines and fields of graduate education at RISD.

Selectively inclusive and provocatively far-flung, the exhibition welcomes new graduate students to our lively, supportive, yet challenging community of research, inquiry, discovery, collaboration, and critical making. And for continuing graduate students, it is a generative prompt and cultural probe as many of them begin their final thesis year.

Take a few steps back from a finished work and what is found is a space that is live and in motion. It’s a space based on possibility rather than certitude and imbued with the fluidity of transformative action.

So much of our work at RISD at the graduate level is collaborative and cross-disciplinary. Document. Document. Document. is a richly performative documentation of the work of co-curators Kristina Lamour Sansone and Anne West; Sameer Farooq (MFA Graphic Design ’14) who co-wrote the essay with Anne West; designer Gabe Melcher (MFA Graphic Design ’16), and many graduate students from the Class of 2014. As always, Mark Moscone, Director of Exhibitions, and colleagues Gunnar Norquist and Kevin Hughes worked with the co-curators to design and install a reflective, searching, and active space for participants to experience and engage a generosity and fluidity of visual concepts, translational opportunities, and intellectually vibrant inquiry and open-hearted making.

—Patricia C. Phillips, Dean, Graduate Studies

Document. Document. Document.
September 8–28, 2014
RISD Exhibition

In collaboration with Kristina Lamour Sansone, Sameer Farooq, Gabriel Melcher, Mark Moscone, and Hasan Askari
Index of Research

“So, what is the space of documentation? Largely, it is one of working at the threshold: in-between uncertainty and judgment, fact and fiction, image and form, memory and imagination, making and interpretation. Anchored in experience as a primary mode of perception, multiple scenarios emerge in this space of productive freedom.”
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