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OnlineOct 22, 2024

At Boston Cyberarts Gallery, “Plastic Image Retrospective” Reflects on When Xerox Machines Were Avant-Garde

The group exhibition looks back at Plastic Image, a groundbreaking yet overlooked electrographics studio and community space on Thayer Street.

Review by Jackson Davidow

Bonnie Biggs, "Self-Portrait with Spritual Advisors," installation view, 1982. Installation view, group exhibition, "Plastic Image Retrospective: Electrographic Prints, 1979–90," on view at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery through October 26, 2024.

Before the South End’s gentrification, Thayer Street—what we now think of as the heart of the SoWA district—was a punk haven for artistic expression, experimentation, and collaboration in the 1970s and 1980s. Central to this milieu was Plastic Image, a studio, makerspace, and gallery devoted to the art of electrographics. Headquartered in a grungy Thayer Street loft, the organization was not only one of the country’s earliest workshops focused on the use of electrographic media, but also New England’s only all-electronic art gallery, with monthly curated shows. Owned and managed by artists Sherry Edwards and George Fifield from 1979 to 1990, Plastic Image gave fellow practitioners the opportunity to create “copy art” or “Xerox art.” The workshop proudly boasted two types of machines; there was the Haloid Xerox, a black-and-white copier introduced in 1958, and which could be rejigged with color toner, and the Xerox 6500, a color copier that came out in 1973.

Archival photocopies made at Plastic Image of Equal Times newspaper, a feminist newspaper that circulated in Boston from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

In those days, almost all copiers, whether black and white or color, were confined to copy centers, where customers were not permitted to use the expensive machines themselves. At Plastic Image, however, artists received both hands-on technical training and the encouragement—or perhaps, more accurately—the mandate to make the machines do what they weren’t designed to. Play and experimentation, Edwards and Fifield firmly believed, led to innovation and richer forms of art and community.

The first retrospective of work produced at Plastic Image is on view at Jamaica Plain’s Boston Cyberarts Gallery through October 26. Organized by Edwards, the modest exhibition features electrographic prints by a diverse group of multimedia artists—Muriel Angelil, Bonnie Biggs, Carla Cooper, Marie Favorito, Anne Grant, Lou Jones, BC Kagan, Laura Slygh, Michael Slygh, Gary Stubelick, Maria Termini, and Hal Thurman—as well as Fifield and Edwards herself. These works span media that one might not necessarily associate with Xerox machines, including T-shirts and shoes. While some such as Biggs’s Self-Portrait with Spiritual Advisors (1982) and Fifield’s Untitled (1983) tend toward the surreal, others, including Favorito’s Sun Ra (1980), are more documentary in style. (The famous musician could frequently be found playing with Bill Sebastian’s Outer Space Visual Communicator, a visual music system, and hanging out at the neighboring Star Systems loft on Thayer Street.) The particular vibrancy of the color toner makes clear that these aren’t simply chromogenic prints. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is a fitting venue for this retrospective because Fifield founded this alternative art space in 2011. Edwards moreover dedicates this exhibition to her former collaborator, who died last year.

(left) Marie Favorito, Jackson, 1980, Xerox 6500. (right) Marie Favorito, Sun Ra, 1980. Xerox 6500. Installation view, “Plastic Image Retrospective: Electrographic Prints, 1979–90,” on view at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery through October 26, 2024. Photo courtesy of Sherry Edwards.

Though only open for eleven years, Plastic Image had a meaningful impact on the local and national media arts scene. It also shaped, and responded to the needs of, an all but lost community. In Boston’s tech-infused contemporary cityscape, where buzzy initiatives that bridge art and technology are often trumpeted with little criticality, we need to be reminded of art histories in which technology works against rather than on behalf of the forces of gentrification. This Plastic Image retrospective demonstrates that the history of copy art remains important, strange, and worthy of deeper exploration.

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Jackson Davidow

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