Portable Postcard Exhibitions

Sonia Landy Sheridan's Portable Postcard Exhibitions are two exhibitions made forty-two years apart, each transformed into a collection of postcards that can be held in your hands. The first was created at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Sheridan gathered work from students and faculty and reproduced the contributions as individual postcards. Rather than documenting an exhibition taking place somewhere else, the postcards themselves formed the exhibition. They could be collected in their enclosure, spread across a table, rearranged, carried away or mailed. The project appeared at a pivotal moment in Sheridan's work. Around this time she founded Generative Systems at SAIC, an influential program exploring how artists could work with emerging technologies of reproduction, imaging and communication. The postcard exhibition shares many of those concerns: an artwork becomes reproducible information, enters a standardized format, and can then circulate through a network. In 2011 Sheridan returned to the idea with Portable Postcard Exhibition 2. By then, the network had changed. The participants were connected through the Generative Systems community on Facebook rather than simply through proximity at an art school. Digital communication made it possible for a geographically dispersed group to create an exhibition together. Sheridan nevertheless brought that electronic network back into the physical world as postcards. The two exhibitions make an elegant technological loop: 1969: art-school community → images → printing → postcards → portable exhibition 2011: online community → digital images → printing → postcards → portable exhibition Forty-two years of technological change transformed how the artists found one another and how their images traveled, but the final interface remained remarkably similar: open an enclosure, take out the cards, and hold an exhibition in your hands. That is what I find most compelling about the series. The exhibition is the object.