Rebekah Burgess Abramovich

Showcased work: Too often we think of the objects contained in historical collections and archives as permanent. These filed analog objects appear fixed--fixed in time and fixed in materiality. The paper on which the evidence / documentation is held, however, is merely organic matter. No matter how Archivists arm themselves to ward off damage from natural use and wear to fire and floods, materials decay. A NY Times article on December 1, 2021, reported on the rising water levels in the storage areas of the Smithsonian's American History Museum. The Times reported a fire burning through the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America in March 23, 2020. Many other repositories are regularly incurring damage. After Hurricane Sandy (2012) and, and later Hurricane Ida (2021), the City Archives in which I worked sustained substantial damage. Despite all efforts, the small staff could not remediate at the scale needed. While mourning the loss of priceless original historical resources, I was struck by the effects of standing water on photographic emulsion over time. Rather than creating a blank slate, or washing away the matter, the new ruptured form of the photographs and documents obscured certain details, and yet let other details—a subtext— emerge. The ‘Organic Matters’ series is created through a process of repeatedly submerging or flooding copy prints made from NYC municipal images, allowing the pages to expand and contract with standing water and variable temperatures, growing organisms from pulp and emulsion. Once scanned and copied, I apply resin and glass beads to the fresh image surface, articulating the damage and bringing focus to the altered surface of the image, to the impermanence of documentation.