January 19, 2012
Joshua Caleb Weibley is an artist based in New York. His work is a love letter to drawing theory. I met Josh at a New Years party in Williamsburg and he seemed like a smart guy with some similar thoughts on art as my own. So when he had a show a few weeks later in a small gallery I went to see what he had been working on.  Contents of Archive Fever sat in a room with art that I wasn’t impressed with and perhaps that made it all the more exciting. In what seemed like an ordinary white binder there were what seemed like hundreds of pages blank save for one pencil line drawn across each page. Not knowing Josh, I could see how many people would just walk away confused and not give it a second thought. But that would be their loss because he is one of the most thoughtful and intense artist I have personally worked with and this is a good example of why; The first page of this book was an exact copy of the table of contents from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Each page thereafter had a singular, perfectly straight line that ran across the page, throughout the book, gradually making its way from the top of the pages in the beginning of the book to the bottom at the end. Upon closer inspection it would show that there was mild gradation in each line. This monotonous task was a deconstruction of that very table of contents, meticulously line by line, page by page, until the entirety of the first page had been splayed out through the whole book! I’m sure both Derrida and Sol LeWitt are smiling down on him from somewhere! Months later I invited him to be apart of a group show I curated called Black & White & Read All Over. For this show he outdid himself with an entirely handwritten duplicate of the closing credits of Avatar (Avatar has longer closing credits that any film ever produced at this point) on old computer printer paper with the notches on the sides. He hung it from the ceiling and weighted the stack on the ground with a bootleg copy of the movie itself he’d picked up in Chinatown. And like a ridiculous Greek column, it stood as an analog monument to state of the art special effects. 

Joshua Caleb Weibley is an artist based in New York. His work is a love letter to drawing theory. I met Josh at a New Years party in Williamsburg and he seemed like a smart guy with some similar thoughts on art as my own. So when he had a show a few weeks later in a small gallery I went to see what he had been working on. 

Contents of Archive Fever sat in a room with art that I wasn’t impressed with and perhaps that made it all the more exciting. In what seemed like an ordinary white binder there were what seemed like hundreds of pages blank save for one pencil line drawn across each page. Not knowing Josh, I could see how many people would just walk away confused and not give it a second thought. But that would be their loss because he is one of the most thoughtful and intense artist I have personally worked with and this is a good example of why; The first page of this book was an exact copy of the table of contents from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Each page thereafter had a singular, perfectly straight line that ran across the page, throughout the book, gradually making its way from the top of the pages in the beginning of the book to the bottom at the end. Upon closer inspection it would show that there was mild gradation in each line. This monotonous task was a deconstruction of that very table of contents, meticulously line by line, page by page, until the entirety of the first page had been splayed out through the whole book! I’m sure both Derrida and Sol LeWitt are smiling down on him from somewhere!

Months later I invited him to be apart of a group show I curated called Black & White & Read All Over. For this show he outdid himself with an entirely handwritten duplicate of the closing credits of Avatar (Avatar has longer closing credits that any film ever produced at this point) on old computer printer paper with the notches on the sides. He hung it from the ceiling and weighted the stack on the ground with a bootleg copy of the movie itself he’d picked up in Chinatown. And like a ridiculous Greek column, it stood as an analog monument to state of the art special effects. 

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