TRANSFER is pleased to present ‘CRUFT’, an exhibition of drawings and electronic waste by Joshua Caleb Weibley.

“CRUFT” features drawings that were first exhibited in Seattle, WA depicting industry-standard guides to programs and coding languages (specifically, drawings of O’Reilly Media’s “Animal” books series). They are meticulously rendered by hand with a ruler and a pen on letter paper—line by line as if by an erratic ink-jet printer—and were originally devised for their first presentation with the nearby headquarters of Amazon.com and Microsoft in mind.

If a machine tried to empathize with and relate itself to organic life, it might see in the printing cycles of these books or the extinctions of the animals on their covers metaphors for its own product lifecycle and that of the different languages running through it that are outlined by O’Reilly’s series.

The exhibition’s title is a jargon term for anything that is left over or redundant, employed particularly for superseded, unused technical and electronic hardware and useless, superfluous or dysfunctional elements in computer software. Here, the word comments on the works’ subjects (and status as remnants from the last exhibition) as well as on material needs implicitly associated with network-based art practices — like those supported by the exhibition venue TRANSFER in Brooklyn, NY.

As it happens, new regulations are in place as of this year in New York fining the improper disposal of old computers and their peripherals, televisions, fax machines, VCRs, DVD players, printers/scanners, video game consoles, MP3 players, tablets, and small servers. This is a positive development.

The seemingly disembodied immediacy of technological advancement is in no way as immaterial as we are often encouraged to believe. And so it is with materiality in mind that, in addition to presenting works from the earlier exhibition, “Cruft” will serve as an ad hoc electronic waste collection site.

Visitors are invited to bring e-waste to TRANSFER where it will remain on view parallel to the re-installed drawings for the exhibition’s duration. At the close of the exhibition it will be properly removed in collaboration with the Lower East Side Ecology Center. The LES Ecology Center asks that viewers refrain from bringing light bulbs or batteries until the closing event, September 19th 10AM-4PM, at which LES Ecology Center staff will be on hand to receive these. Otherwise, for guidelines about what is appropriate to dispose of at TRANSFER, refer to http://nyc.gov/electronics or email director@transfergallery.com

About the Artist :::
Joshua Caleb Weibley was born the year O’Reilly Media published their first “Animal” book. He currently works for the online hand-made goods marketplace Etsy in Brooklyn. Weibley’s work is included in White Columns’ artist registry and has most recently been shown at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery (New York), et al Projects (New York) and Veronica (Seattle) at which works in this exhibition were first presented under the title “Colophon”. Work in this show has been written about on The Creators Project and (perhaps appropriately enough as it shares a founder with O’Reilly Media) on Makezine.

For more information: http://thebestrevenge.info