Nov.

3
Dec. 8 2017

NO Town Hall,
Williamstown

AGEN-
DA
Zak Arctander
Allana Clarke
Kim Faler
Ilana Harris-Babou
Nicole Maloof
NO AGENDA
No Agenda is a misnomer, a swipe at
embodying the improvisational nature of a
rapidly assembled site-specific exhibition.
There is a goal; its to show work by Williams
College Visiting Studio Art Faculty in Town
Hall along a six-week timeline, and encour-
age unplanned pairings of work and site.
Previously a fraternity house, and now a
police station and government building, this
charged space complicates the personal
narratives and subjects apparent in each
artists work.
In No Agenda, Zak Arctander pho-
tographs moments of intense indecision,
creating images and videos that are innocent
until theyre sinister, fun until theyre concern-
ing. Allana Clarke employs sound to fix a
critical gaze on hierarchies active and latent
in our governments, communities and social
circles. Kim Faler pauses and preserves
memories before theyre forgotten with paint-
ings sourced from other peoples personal
notes. Ilana Harris-Babou casts obsolete
office technology in plaster and satirizes the
forced didactic in DIY and promotional vid-
eos. Nicole Maloof creates new drawings to
consider Town records and whose histories
are archived, and why.
Thematically, nothing ties together the
photography, video, performance, sculpture
and drawing of the Williams College Visiting
Studio Art Faculty in No Agenda; however,
each artists careful consideration of the site
questions how making and teaching are un-
predictable, iterative, interrelated processes.
Both have end goals, but the steps toward
them are malleable as the goals themselves
shift and change. The artists mark is often
a thinking mark; process is pedagogical.
Inspiration for this touch and go approach
to organization is owed to Hamza Walker,
who pushed me to work fast to disallow
overthinking.
No Agenda kicked off the first week
of September when Town Manager Jason
Hoch asked earnestly, Do you want to come
see Town Hall? Since then, Jason and Deb
Turnbull have been more generous with their
time and support than I could have asked
for, opening up and entertaining the different
spaces where artists could show their work.
From the very first conversations with Zak,
Allana, Kim, Ilana and Nicole, to the opening
of the exhibition, it has been six fast weeks. I
am so thrilled by and grateful for the artists
willingness to collaborate on this endeavor
and I am so impressed by their thoughtful-
ness in adapting their practice and work
to Town Hall. Special thanks go to Krista
Gelev for designing this simple and elegant
catalogue, and to Brian Trelegan for his
close, critical eye on the essays. My deep
appreciation goes to Grace Fan, whose
precise photography helped document this
exhibition.
One other thing: It seems writing, de-
sign, interpretation cant even keep up with
art sometimes; this catalogue had to go to
print before some of the work was finished,
or installed in the space. It just goes to show
that making is constant, and that theres no
line by line predetermination of whats going
to come next.
No Agenda celebrates and critically
examines the art being made at Williams. I
hope youll have as much uncertain, restless
fun wandering through the exhibition as we
had in making it.
Alex Jen, Curator
Locations
Basement
Stairwell
First Floor Boardroom

Second Floor Hallway
Third Floor Meeting Room
& Offices
 Zak Arctander
Allana Clarke
& Offices (all floors)

Ilana Harris-Babou
Kim Faler
om Nicole Maloof
 ZAK ARCTANDER
Zak Arctander makes work at tip-
ping points; his photographs and vid-
eos are submerged in the stress and
intensity that seethes right as goading
gets nasty and games lose their fun.
In an excerpt from Jump (2017), a
b. 1986, Park Ridge, IL; lives
and works in Williamstown, MA
video work in progress, Arctander
maneuvers his camera in and around
a group of college-aged students on
a weekend trip to a swimming hole
in Western Massachusetts. Drinking,
dancing, and laughing abounds as
do dares and peer pressure.
Jump starts with a boy before a
rope swing, grasping and letting go of
it apprehensively. I dont really want to
do it, he says. His friends reply, with a
tinge of scorn, You can tell Rosie you
did it. Arctander cuts to a clip of wa-
ter, strangely flat and plastic, catching
glints of sunlight as it swirls and bub-
bles, then a slow, cinematic swerve
through the woods. The students have
chosen to escape into nature, or, the
middle of nowhere, for their weekend.
Back to the boy: I just dont know if I
want to do it, you know? Its not that
Im afrai I mean, Im afraid to do it,
but... Sharp claps pierce the air not
congratulatory or encouraging, but
forceful, almost spiteful. His friends tell
him, completely disingenuously, Dont
do it, if you dont want to do it.
Arctander cuts to a royal blue
polyester Reebok shirt, wrinkled and
stretched out on a mossy rock, leaves
strewn over it. Light shines onto the
white trim of its sleeve; its been left
behind torn off in an act of macho
bravado? Reluctance pervades; the
shirt, shed and sadly abandoned, is
the last protective shell for the boy
who didnt want to jump.
Jump is about an uncertainty in
belonging that lingers, and the acts
that are performed to try and cover
it up but fail, that instead eat away at
ones shifting perceptions of self-
worth. Arctanders camera zooms but
never really chooses a focus; it feels
its way around hesitantly, akin to dart-
ing your eyes around at a party, hoping
youll recognize someone before
someone recognizes youre alone. The
frame shakes with a rhythm that plays
off the gentle ripples of the swimming
hole. Jumps scenes are accented by
Paul Grimstads soundtrack, which
begins with a hollow, resounding burst
of digital sounds, before pedaling
back and forth between bright, warp-
ing noises and pitched but fractured
notes that expand and echo. Grims-
tads score in Jump feels like its being
played in an eerie vacuum where all
extraneous sound has been sucked
out. Fitting for a revel in the woods
that threatens to collapse.
Arctanders consideration of the
edge as a theme is echoed in Chip
(2015), a photograph of a dogs torso,
frozen by flash in mid-prance. A note
is aggressively scrawled over the
picture:
MY Broken dog, CHIP/ MY
LOVELY PUP/ DOCTOR BOTCHED
HIS NUT JOB twice/ SKIN SO
TIGHT DOWN THERE/ Got boners/
NON STOP.
At first read, its absurd. You
conjure the image, and laugh, but then
bite your lip. Its a funny, but devastat-
ing, image. Arctander now implicates
us, the viewers, in indecision. What
are we really thinking when we tell
or laugh at a cruel joke? Its okay,
we dont mean it our actions arent
influenced. Right?
Even the printed text here cannot
convey the look of Chips irregularly
jotted words the letters look broken,
some lines connecting and crossing,
others strangely spaced. The words arent
just overlaid on the photograph, though;
they are sharp, in focus and cast a shadow;
they are the foreground. The text is searing;
when you close your eyes, you can still
picture it.
Arctander continues to explore the
formal charge of text and the drawn line in
Telenoid (2017), a photograph which shows
Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories Telenoid, a
telepresence robot whose shape recalls
Casper the Friendly Ghost, hovering
beneath scribbled drawings of happy faces
and caricatures. The drawings feel sinister.
Some of their white lines sit above the
photograph, as if on a sheet of glass; some
seem to be drawn on the blackboard-like
background itself; others appear chalky and
faded, as if Arctander photographed them
right before they disappeared. Together,
the drawings and the Telenoid, with its
shortened arms meant for hugging, give the
photograph an unsteady discomfort the
Stills from Jump
(in progress), 2017
Music composed by Paul Grimstad
HD video
Images courtesy of the artist
robot too close to being alive, the frantic,
deranged drawings violently uneasy.
The drawings are just kids drawings,
though. Their lines, cut, smudged and lay-
ered, cannot be pinned down they are a
formal representation of the gray area where
innocence becomes sinister. Arctander puts
his viewers at these tense moments, leaving
them to feel what its like to be in a moral
rut. Hopefully then we can reflect.
Standing above the swimming hole,
the boy in Jump grabs the rope and leans
back, as if to gain momentum, but then
shakes his head. He turns around, apolo-
gizes to Arctander feeling guilty as if he
owed him something and then lets the
rope swing away. But he still looks as it
swings back, his hand hovering out does
he catch it, and jump? Hopefully not.
 ALLANA CLARKE
Can complicity be unintentional?
And if yes, does that even matter?
Allana Clarkes dual channel sound
piece Untitled (2017), installed in the
stairwell in Town Hall, collapses into its
aural environment, barely noticeable at
lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
b. 1987, Trinidad and Tobago;
first. Its gradual crystallization asks how
we might unknowingly and passively
interact with and contribute to our
surrounding social structures and
and Williamstown, MA
hierarchies.
Untitled consists of two looped
recordings, the first of Clarke walking
up and down the stairwell, and the sec-
ond of her stumbling and falling down
the stairs. The work blends in with the
steps of visitors, but when recognized
its incredibly stark each tumble a slip
and clatter that gives way into a loud
crash. Visitors might grimace, but Unti-
tled continues faithfully no swearing,
no moans of pain, no complaints just
more climbing.
I dont want the experience
of Untitled to be at the fore-
front of visitors consciousness.
Theyre entering the stairwell to
move through the exhibition, and
are encountering something they
will or will not notice.
The stumbles in Untitled are spo-
radic Clarke emphasizes how hard
it is to predict, or have control over a
social structure that may hinder its in-
dividuals, especially those of the lower
and middle classes. Untitled questions
how hierarchy is arbitrary, and frustrat-
ingly shows that those who receive the
short end of the stick have no choice
but to participate. But Untitled also
asks what it means to participate we
hear the stumbles, but continue to walk
up and down the stairs, making our
way through Town Hall. When does
passive ignorance become active?
As visitors make their way up and
down the stairs, strings of text in gray
vinyl, part of a new body of work, fade
in and out of the wall as they catch
and reflect light, and gradually reveal
themselves:
Should you wish to loosen your
grip/ you would hear me answer/ What
could it mean to forget who we are?
Clarke critically asks how much
we define ourselves by living off of,
or even stepping on, the backs of
others. Theres no alternative to social
stratification yet the comfortable
stay comfortable, and a struggle for
progress can feel like a perpetual step
forward that never crosses the starting
line. But perhaps whats more troubling
is how Clarke identifies an exhaustion
of being oppressed, that may just lead
to submission. At some point, is it easi-
er to forget, to efface oneself, to want
a particular identity no longer?
Untitled is sparse, informed by
the space in which it is installed. While
Town Hall is a municipal building that
also houses the Williamstown Police
Department, theres a strange discon-
nect in that it is frequently empty bad
things dont happen in Williamstown.
I know a different reality, having
spent time in cities where their town
halls, courtrooms and jail cells are
constantly filled. There, it seems acts of
power are constantly being performed
against the already immobilized.
But Clarke stresses that just
because power structures and their
carryings-on arent always immediately
apparent, doesnt mean theyre not still
in place. The jail cells in Town Hall are
quiet they go on unused perhaps
literally, but not at all figuratively.
Who would
you be if
Others
didnt hurt?
Who would you be if Others didnt hurt?, 2017
Vinyl on wall, dimensions variable
Image courtesy of the artist
 KIM FALER
Kim Falers new body of work
Give Me Your Anxiety (2017) grasps at
traces. Sourced from the handwritten
lists and notes of family and friends, the
series archives once important, now
b. 1980, Lima, Ohio; lives and
throwaway moments, before letting
them warp and corrode. Faler begins
works in Williamstown, MA
by photographing and stenciling the
notes physical marks with white au-
tomotive paint onto large steel plates.
The finish is slick and permanent, yet it
recalls the smooth, matte texture of a
piece of paper. Scrawled numbers and
cursive letters exist as negative, metal
space intimate but reproduced, ges-
tural but cold until the rust dissolves
the marks and blemishes the surface.
Give Me Your Anxiety fits somewhere
in between painting and sculpture,
its additive process ultimately one of
interruption and deterioration.
When someone in your life
disappears, or dies unexpectedly
all of a sudden, everything they
held, they touched, they looked
at garners a certain reverence.
A note your father wrote you is
more important than something your
friend did.
Give Me Your Anxiety asks how
value is relative and assigned to memo-
ry. The cropped notes Faler represents
in the work are like quick drawings that
emphasize how shorthand is arbitrary
and individual. Letters blur into each
other, their lines and curves becoming
dashes and squiggles.
But, the work is neither literally
nor figuratively personal. Faler detach-
es herself from the narrative to open up
the conversation are other peoples
anxieties similar to yours, and every-
body elses? Instead of love letters
or spiteful notes, Faler uses grocery
lists and scratch paper with random
measurements or calculations to con-
sider the accumulation and eventual
weight of smaller, everyday anxieties.
Give Me Your Anxiety is about holding
onto slippage, and the desire to make
fleeting thoughts concrete. The work
asks how and why we experience and
filter the present.
Falers act of rusting speeds up a
breakdown and forgetting that makes
the present seem like the past. Ian, the
work in No Agenda, vibrates the note
hangs on a pulsing, electric green wall
that emphasizes its anxiety. The rust
is a dirty brown-orange, and almost
leaves a thin, hazy smear on the paint,
its matte surface now grimy. Ghost
outlines show traces of where and
how the acid slipped and ran down
the plate but did not stain. The letters
themselves are silver no more but a
yellow-brown, encrusted in layers of
scabrous puddles and raised flecks.
Their texture and appearance is thick
and sticky, like the glob of ink that
finally comes out of a clogged ballpoint
pen, shiny and reflective.
Theres something longing about
the works in Give Me Your Anxiety.
Theyre monuments to unknown or in-
completely-known individuals. Looking
at them is like finding a message in a
bottle that wasnt quite properly sealed.
Detail of Ian, from Give Me Your Anxiety (in progress), 2017
Automotive paint and rust on steel, 30 x 50 in.
Image courtesy of the artist
 ILANA HARRIS-BABOU
It takes a minute to recognize the
disarming performance at work in Ilana
Harris-Babous videos. Her voiceovers
b. 1991, Brooklyn, NY; lives and works
sound frivolous until their content proves
in Brooklyn, NY and Williamstown, MA
the opposite; she parodies music
videos, cooking shows and DIY videos
to make heavy, painful themes more pal-
atable and thus considered, and not
ignored. In Reparation Hardware (2017),
a work in progress, Harris-Babou plays
off the promotional videos of Restoration
Hardware, a luxury home-furnishings
company that prides itself on using re-
claimed wood and bronze, among other
old materials, to make new furniture.
Reparation Hardware pits Resto-
ration Hardware and other artists and
designers fetishization of the past to
make something new and beautiful,
against the idea that the history of
slavery can be touched up and forgotten
with reparations. In the video, Harris-Ba-
bou collapses the distinctions between
art and life, past and present, playing
an artist cum performer cum furniture
designer. Add to that her role in grainy
photos as a black homesteader, and
Harris-Babou puts herself in an ironic,
contradictory situation wherein she is
simultaneously negatively affected by,
yet selectively filtering through, a history
of slavery to create a compelling frame
for the new wares.
As the video pans past run-down
barns and the rolling countryside of
Western Massachusetts, Harris-Babou
sells her product:
When designing the new line, I
asked myself, How could these newly
free individuals make a space for them-
selves that was both free of discrimi-
nation, tasteful and refined? Their
liberation was handcrafted.
Visibly and exaggeratedly strug-
gling for inspiration, Harris-Babou
scribbles shapes in a sketchbook and
repeatedly scrawls 40 ACRES AND
A MULE on lined paper referencing
Union General William Tecumseh Sher-
mans infamous suggestion that some
land and livestock could seamlessly put
former slaves back in society to work
and start families. Harris-Babou never
really clarifies what her line is in the
video, though the vagueness of the
products reflects the vague promises of
reparation. How can you determine the
price of repayment for a forced labor
whose price was arbitrary and inhumane
in the first place?
Harris-Babou parses out this ques-
tion with quick clips of the line being
made and tested before final production.
A hammer handle made of wet, brown
clay is pushed impaled through a
row of nails, before Harris-Babou tries
to smooth over and fill in their holes. But
immediate fixes and solutions for slavery
dont exist, and the idea of reparations
is much too little too late; its bitterly
ironic that its believers try to patch up
and efface the slavery they created and
condoned to begin with. Harris-Babou
uses the back claw of a ceramic hammer
to futily pull a nail out of a wood plank,
and strikes around a nail without ever
hitting its head.
Reparation Hardware stays active
with its continuous self-critical question-
ing. The language describing the new
line that its use of old wood bears the
mark of time to speak to its beholders
is empty when carefully considered.
Both Reparation Hardware and the Res-
toration Hardware videos its deriding
are supposed to be promotional but are
only vaguely informational, and leave the
viewer more confused than when they
started.
Perhaps Harris-Babou, in making a
work of video art, is commenting on the
expressively vague parading of almost
messages common in the medium, and
maybe even essays like this. Its hard
to tell if her narrations in Reparation
Hardware are genuine or sardonic. Har-
 ris-Babous performance of a peppy artist in
Reparation Hardware and her other videos
stems from criticisms she received in school
for making work that depicted process quite
literally.
You either get to be a white man
making formal lard and thinking
about grand ideas and the uni-
verse. Or you get to be a person
of color explaining why youre a
person of color.
computer monitor fragments are suspended
in clay, steeped in a strange, ahistorical
existence.
The ceramics will be spread around
offices in Town Hall, hidden in daily use,
so to speak. Their subtle subversion echoes
in Reparation Hardwares blissfully idyllic
setting, so similar to Williamstowns.

Harris-Babous exploration of process

in video transfers into tactile sculpture, as
well. For No Agenda, she cast stray, dated
pieces of technology found in Town Hall in
plaster, creating beautifully but mysteriously
glazed ceramics that recall cuneiform tablets
and appear as discarded, almost-contem-
porary fossils. Imprints of USB cables and

Stills from Reparation Hardware

(in progress), 2017
HD video
Images courtesy of the artist
 NICOLE MALOOF
On Tuesdays and Fridays, Nicole
Maloof sits in on a calculus class at
b. 1983, Seoul, Korea; lives and works
Williams keeping up with the home-
in New York, NY and Williamstown, MA
work and tests, too before tutoring
ACT math and science test prep in
the afternoon. On Wednesdays and
Thursdays, Maloof teaches drawing
and printmaking. These disciplines
seem unrelated, but they all figure
equally into her practice. For Maloof,
art, math and science are all means
to intuitively materialize theories and
observations about the world; how
the line moves as its drawn or how
its eventually printed, how chemicals
proceed to change in a reaction flask
all emphasize on-the-spot decisions
and embrace chance.
Numbers and equations may
seem cold and absolute, but not
for Maloof her work constantly
questions empiricism as it contrasts
with data and their corresponding
interpretations, or how meanings
can exist because of preconceived
notions, and shift based on different
ways of reading.
In Once More, With Feeling,
an ink on polypropylene work with
overlaid projection from 2014, out-
lines of women and sinister, bestial
creatures in dark red ink cover the
surface in swathes, overlapping and
obliterating each other. In one detail,
a Needleman (Maloofs creation),
bearing an uncomfortably toothy grin,
uses his comically long, sharp, phallic
nose to pierce the chest of the female
figure he is clutching in his arms, while
simultaneously receiving the gesture in
return as she stabs him in the shoulder
with her own pointed weapon. Its a
mess of bodies, a battle.
People read the work as signi-
fying violence against women. But if
you look at the body counts listed at
the bottom of the drawing, the women
are winning they contradict what you
expect. Who trains us to see certain
narratives, or think a particular way?
Maloof often mines through infor-
mation to ask how data and meaning
are constructed, and how visual ap-
pearances can betray empirical facts.
For No Agenda, Maloof considers
the death records of, allegedly, all the
Williamstown residents who passed
prior to 1850. Said document was
compiled by the New England Historic
Genealogical Society in 1907 based
on gravestone records, but those exist
with two possibly more instances
of exclusion. Its possible that individu-
als of certain races or classes werent
deemed important enough for the
record in 1907, but its also possible
that there were never grave records,
or even graves, for them to begin with.
Maloof will execute the work,
For the Office of the Town Clerk of
Williamstown (2017), with dry erase
markers on different whiteboards
spread throughout Town Hall. The
drawings will blend into the daily
proceedings of Williamstown govern-
ment; Maloof chose whiteboards for
their connotations of organization to
reference how pedagogy goes hand
in hand with her art practice. They also
keep temporary records in their use
and reuse, constantly being written
on and erased. Maloof will play off
schematic diagrams interspersed with
imagined characters of Williamstown
past not to direct or teach anything
specific, but rather to ask if we consid-
 er historys gaps, and also to show how
absurd lists and identifications like these
death records are.
Do we really understand what
the lives of folks in William-
stown were like from these re-
cords? Theyre real, but they kind
of have no meaning. Im exploring
these contradictions to show how
fragile information can be.
This essay skirts description of
the drawings because they havent yet
been created at the time of print, and for
Maloof, a drawing happens in the moment
of its making.
My line is a thinking line. Its not a
passive line, nor is it a descriptive line; its
a line that my hand has to find. Each mark
I make reacts to idiosyncrasies of how my
personal life usually deeply personal
things or any intellectual concerns I
currently have, are in existence.
Detail of Once More, With Feeling, 2014
Ink on polypropylene with projection,
dimensions variable
Image courtesy of the artist
In this sense, For the Office of the
Town Clerk of Williamstown is as much
experiment as it is artwork. Maloofs
practice, on a larger scale, questions how
information is framed and given to us.
The records room in Town Hall is in
the basement, guarded by a vault door.
Visitors are welcome, but will be sternly
instructed not to spin the dial no one
knows what the combination to the lock
is. Some of these records predate current
Williamstown administration why did
the government choose to hold onto what
it did so long ago? If all the information in
that room disappeared, what would the
consequence be?
Are there any consequences, then,
to our history that never documented
those who have been left out?
Detail of For the Office of
the Town Clerk of Williamstown, 2017
Dry erase marker on whiteboard,
dimensions variable
Image courtesy of the artist
NO AGENDA
ZAK ARCTANDER, ALLANA CLARKE, KIM FALER, ILANA HARRIS-BABOU, NICOLE MALOOF
NOVEMBER 3, 2017 - DECEMBER 8, 2017
CURATED BY ALEX JEN

No Agenda would not have been possible without the help and generosity of the people and groups
dedicated to thinking critically about and supporting art at Williams.

PREPARATION, INSTALLATION, DESIGN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND PRINTING FOR THIS

EXHIBITION IS SUPPORTED BY THE TOWN OF WILLIAMSTOWN, THE WILLIAMS COLLEGE
ART DEPARTMENT, THE OFFICE OF THE DEAN OF THE COLLEGE, THE WILLIAMS COLLEGE
VICE PRESIDENT FOR CAMPUS LIFE OFFICE, WILLIAMS COLLEGE COUNCIL AND THE
WILLIAMS COLLEGE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE LIFE

GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR THIS CATALOGUE AND ALL

EXHIBITION MATERIAL BY KRISTA GELEV