For “Raid the Icebox Now,” Triple Canopy created Can I Leave You?, a multimedia installation that responds to the RISD Museum’s Pendleton House, which was built in 1906 to exhibit the bequest (and resemble the nearby home) of the collector Charles Pendleton. This volume revises the lavish catalogue of Pendleton’s collection, published by the museum in 1906 in a limited edition featuring photogravure illustrations. In To Make New Bodies Out of Old Shapes, Triple Canopy focuses on the catalogue’s text, a seemingly anodyne description of styles and techniques. This language, however, is a manifestation of the rhetoric around taste, distinction, and progress, especially in industry and art, that has fueled the formation of American identity and abetted the exercise of American power.
As To Make New Bodies Out of Old Shapes progresses, the original catalogue is increasingly augmented by nationalistic speeches, nostalgic stories, messianic sermons, and other original sources that reflect this underlying agenda. Dutiful assessment of the collection is interrupted by a time traveler who meddles with the rebellion against the British, an enslaved person harvesting mahogany to furnish the homes of New England aristocrats, and a Chinese philosopher disturbed by the patrician penchant for dragons and pagodas.
Eventually, To Make New Bodies Out of Old Shapes gives itself over to these accounts.
The full text of To Make New Bodies Out of Old Shapes can be accessed here.
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This chapter accompanies the exhibition Raid the Icebox Now with Triple Canopy: Can I Leave You?, on view at the RISD Museum November 22, 2019–October 25, 2020. Concept and direction by Alexander Provan, Matthew Shen Goodman, and C. Spencer Yeh, with Hannah Whitaker and Meredith Morran; revision of The Pendleton Collection by Alexander Provan; script by Matthew Shen Goodman and Alexander Provan; video editing by Meredith Morran with C. Spencer Yeh; videography by Jess Y Lee with Carolyn Gennari and Erik Gould.
Publication Project Lead by Jeremy Radtke. Creative direction by Carolyn Gennari. Design by Brendan Campbell. Animation sequences by Kit Son Lee. Curatorial Support by Sarah Ganz Blythe. Additional production support by Carson Evans, Kit Son Lee, Arielle Eisen, Alex Hanesworth, and Jeremy Radtke. Special Thanks to RISD Archives and Andrew Martinez and Douglas Doe.
Photographs used in plate illustrations courtesy of The Pendleton Collection by RISD Museum, copyright 1904 by Luke Vincent Lockwood.
Glass Plate Negatives courtesy of RISD Archives
