Michael Stickrod
Michael Stickrod, installation view, 2008 Altoids Award, New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.

2008 Altoids Award brought together the four recipients of the inaugural Altoids Award at the New Museum in New York: Ei Arakawa, Lauren Kelley, Michael Patterson-Carver, and Michael Stickrod. Selected from forty-six nominated artists by Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, the recipients participated in an exhibition organized by Massimiliano Gioni.

Michael Stickrod’s installation brought together video works centered on family memory, labor, mortality, and the technologies through which experience is recorded and transmitted. Moving between family photographs, cassette recordings, home video, painting, documentary footage, and first-person recollection, the works treat memory not as something simply preserved, but as something repeatedly reconstructed through media. Across Vacation Money (2003), At the End of the Line (2002), and Vacation Tapes (2008), intimate family histories become part of broader cycles of transmission and transformation, connecting generations of people with generations of recording technologies.

Vacation Money (2003) video. The work brings together family photographs, video, Saundra Stickrod’s recollections, and her paintings, tracing connections between mortality, memory, and creative transmission. Click image to view video.
At the End of the Line (2002) video. Following Richard Stickrod through the Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant in Columbus, Ohio, the work examines labor, bodily waste, industrial transformation, and the unstable boundary between contamination and purification. Click image to view video.