CHRIS LE MESSURIER // Reins, 2024
Archivo LAB 2024
Limited Print Edition
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CHRIS LE MESSURIER
Reins, From the series Beyond the Sea
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Inkjet print on 100% Cotton Rag Fine Art Paper
From an edition of 50, numbered on the reverse
Image size: 8 x 24 cm
Paper size: 24 x 30 cm
Unframed
This print edition was produced in 2024 as part of ARCHIVO’s competitive visual arts program Archivo LAB, and it is one of 50 prints in this limited edition. Proceeds from the purchase of this print will help fund future Archivo LAB programs, supporting emerging artists and innovative visual arts projects.
About this work
In the project “Beyond the Sea”, Chris Le Messurier questions how archival resistance can adapt to the post-digital age and what opportunities exist in critically appropriating rapidly advancing tools. "Beyond the Sea" explores AI's role in contemporary image-making, highlighting the issues of data plundering, rehashing unrelated data, and the user's complicity in refining machine outputs. Discovering numerous unphotographed objects in the British Museum's online catalogue, Le Messurier fed these entries into an image generator, creating a video loop with a synthetic voice narrating the original museum labels. This "flickering history" represents an unstable and questionable amalgam, challenging the meaning and representation of appropriated images.
About Chris Le Messurier
Chris Le Messurier (b 1985) is a photographic artist living in London. In 2023 he completed an MA in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster. His recent research considers algorithmically-influenced aspects of our society, using AI tools to explore a post-human landscape. Thematically, Chris’ photographs and other images tend towards notions of ruin and obsolescence, asking us to consider our position in time. Chris also works as a research assistant and as an educator.
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Archivo LAB 2024, themed "Archivo and Conflict", delved into the relationship between photography, the archive and conflict across different temporalities. Throughout the LAB programme, mentored by curator Helen Starr, artists explored the materialities and immaterialities of archival production within the digital age in regard to contemporary critical appropriations concerned with different perspectives on conflict, as well as history’s repressed events and violations.
