COPY SHOP
CONRAD BAKKER
11/14/25-12/27/25
Above: Untitled Project: COPY SHOP signage photographed in the artist's studio
The Weather Station is pleased to present Untitled Project: COPY SHOP, a new installation by Conrad Bakker Illinois-based artist Conrad Bakker is widely known for his "facsimile" sculptures and installations, which re-create the unmonumental objects and spaces of the everyday. For Untitled Project: COPY SHOP, Bakker brings together a wide array of these objects - carved and painted on a 1:1 scale in the artist's studio - and installs them in The Weather Station to re-create a 24-hour copy shop.
Untitled Project: COPY SHOP positions the archetypal photocopy service businesses of the 80s and 90s as a site of curiosity, inquiry, artistic production, and nostalgia. "There was something strange, wonderful, and creative in this kind of commercial conjoining," Bakker writes in an email to the gallery, "where material-making, experimentation, politics and belief might be connected." For Untitled Project, Bakker has created full-scale copy machines, tables, signage, and office equipment, all of which merge with The Weather Station's architecture (as well as its previous life as a functioning office) to evoke a shared space from our collective, recent past.
Above: Untitled Project: COPY SHOP copy machine detail photographed in the artist's studio
During the last decades of 20th century and prior to the ubiquity of personal printers, copy shops were spaces where flyers, posters, invitations or zines might be generated, and where images could be experimented with through the process of rapid multiplication. They also functioned as a resource for making something happen elsewhere: a place of generative creativity where - for relatively little cost - something quite meaningful might be acquired. Despite the fact that all of these business essentially contained variations of the same equipment or offered the same services, Bakker can still recall the unique interior qualities of his particular copy shop some years later, not to mention the distinct, impossible-to-replicate qualities of a specific toner on paper. While Benjamin would have us believe that the copy lacks the aura of the original, Bakker's Untitled Project makes the claim that the copy shop had an aura all its own*.
At the center of Untitled Project: COPY SHOP is a full-scale facsimile of a XEROX 5018/5028 copy machine, which the artist has carefully re-created using specs and details found on a website titled xeroxnostalgia.com - a digital archive lovingly maintained by like-minded aficionados. While a scale-model copy of a copy machine approaches the absurdist, Bakker's facsimiles are machines of a different kind: in re-making something we have seen or touched countless times, Bakker's work asks us to truly look at its subject, as well as the circumstances by which it enters our lives. This invitation is made somehow all the more poignant when the artist's handwork is present: like a painting from life, Bakker's facsimiles are never flawless replicas, but rather pictures of things made slowly.*
*“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” from Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Above: Untitled Project: COPY SHOP copy machine detail with Bartleby the Scrivener photographed in the artist's studio
While the machines, equipment and supplies from Bakker's copy shop are all represented in his installation, conspicuously absent from Untitled Project: COPY SHOP is the presence of the worker. During the process of building the piece, Bakker found resonance in Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville's 1853 novella of Wall Street. A 'scrivener' is a historic term used to describe a professional copyist - during the 19th century, scriveners were low-end wage laborers whose professional skills of reading and writing employed them in law offices or other places of business, where they were tasked to copy (but not draft) documents of all kinds. Bartleby's famous refusal to perform his duties ("I would prefer not to") is one of Western literature's most enduring images of labor resistance, as well as a parable of inversion. It is through Bartleby's refusal that the labor of copying - once invisibly performed by a human, now invisibly performed by machines - becomes evident.
"His refusal speaks to the beginning of agency," Bakker says, "as if he has agency. In a lot of ways, it's a historical version of the movie Office Space, where you have these characters who resist this machine that they are part of. And it's their resistance which creates a kind of clarity for what that machine really is." Standing inside Untitled Project: COPY SHOP, we might imagine the passive-resistance of the late-night copy shop worker taking a too-long smoke break out back, while we are impatiently left waiting to pay.
For the artist, one of the ways we can begin to understand capitalism is to examine the ways its effects might be made physical. In Bakker's practice, the simulacra becomes a tool to do this, both literally and metaphorically. Untitled Project: COPY SHOP is actually Conrad Bakker's most recent untitled project. Since 1997, the artist has employed this naming convention to describe installations and exhibitions of his surrogate objects, which have been staged in galleries, museums and other spaces and designed to re-create garage sales, thrift stores, record and gift shops. These spaces of exchange hold a longstanding interest to the artist because they are alternative spaces of commerce - places where goods are bought and sold, but not necessarily beholden to corporate oversight. Additional projects by the artist have examined the dynamics of online consumerism, included paintings based on eBay auctions or Amazon delivery confirmation photographs. For his project at The Weather Station, Bakker drew inspiration from longtime Main Street business Instant Copy (now Teragraphics Ink).
Bakker's work reminds us that these spaces are spaces of the everyday; although the objects that move through them might not draw attention to themselves the way that an artwork might, their ubiquity links them profoundly to our lives. To make them into artworks reveals something otherwise hidden. "So much of our shopping has been flattened out," the artist reflects, "there's been this removal of people and a homogeneity of consumerism. The human element is now almost seen as an obstacle to the quickness of consumption." Distinctly human in their form, Bakker's handmade objects and spaces becomes obstacles to quickness, opening for viewers a kind breathing room, a space of thought.
Above: Hand-carved inbox with documents by Conrad Bakker, for Untitled Project: COPY SHOP
For Untitled Project: COPY SHOP, Conrad Bakker will collaborate with Two Steps Press to a create a limited-edition publication of the same name, documenting the Bakker's studio process leading up to his finished installation, and further exploring themes underlying the artist's larger practice. Naturally, the publication will incorporate black-and-white Xerox duplication, as well as color-process by Risograph. Copies of Bakker's artist book will be available for purchase during the run of this exhibition, or by contacting the gallery through email/social media.
Conrad Bakker makes carved/painted sculptures and paintings of everyday objects, installing them in specific sites, consumer contexts, and gallery exhibitions so as to reveal and critically comment upon the political economies and relational networks between persons, things, and places.
Bakker has exhibited his work internationally in venues that include Tate Modern (London), Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva), Fargfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture (Stockholm), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (Chicago), Art in General, Artists’ Space, and Apex Art (New York City), Contemporary Art Museum Houston, in mailboxes, eBay auctions, and on his front lawn. His work has been the subject of articles and reviews in Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art Forum, Art World Magazine, ArtUS, Art Papers, Sculpture, UOVO, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The New Yorker magazine. Bakker has been awarded individual artist grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
Recent projects include: Untitled Project: In Search of Lost Time w/ Galerie Analix Forever at Galeristes, Paris, France, Untitled Project: Mountain /Rock Shop @ Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, Idaho, Untitled Project: Hi-Touch [VHS] + Sign [Blockbuster] @ The Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, Untitled Project: La Chocolaterie [La Boutique, L’Atelier, Le Journal] @ Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, Switzerland, and Untitled Project: Bouquiniste @ Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France.