Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan

In their collaborative work, Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan bring their different artistic styles together to produce work that reflects a shared interest in what happens when objects, materials, and images are translated to a different context. The duo’s first collaboration, presented in 2013, mined a three-decade-long archive of airline menus held by the anthropologist George M. Foster, known for his theory of limited good, which states that only so much positive fortune exists in “peasant” societies. In their work, they reimagined his archive through printing and sculpture, highlighting Foster’s notes and collecting impulses, and reflecting on the sociopolitical ramifications of his scholarship. Sullivan wrote of the project, “Underlying the matter are the unresolved tendencies within the social sciences to stage data, field work, ethos and pathos into models which can be developed and applied as social engineering.”