"Hard Copy New York" at ICP: More Than Meets the Xerox Machine

From left: David Campany, Daniel Arnold, Gray Sorrenti, Aaron Stern, and Ari Marcopoulos in conversation at ICP, April 9, 2026. Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

At ICP last night, David Campany, Daniel Arnold, Gray Sorrenti, Aaron Stern, and Ari Marcopoulos discussed the exhibition “Hard Copy New York,” co-curated by Campany and Stern. The show comprises photocopies of 15 photographers’ work (among them Arnold, Gray, and Marcopoulos), recontextualizing the imagery through shifts in scale, framing, juxtaposition, and the simple act of running it through a Xerox machine.

From the audience, the artist Kara Walker raised the question of appropriation. The exhibition was a collaboration with the artists, permission granted, but her question inspired Daniel Arnold to assert — with was it cynicism or possibly fatigue? — that thanks to social media, everybody copies each other subconsciously anyway. Which made me wonder if acquiescence was the only response to the phenomenon of regurgitation, and if, one generation from now, provenance would even be discussed. Ownership is over, isn’t it? Soon, social media will have trained all of us as if we were a monolothic, corporeal AI. As a result, we'll only be able reinterpret, without attribution, what we’ve been fed. New (human-made) ideas are over too, I guess.

If there’d been time, I’d have asked about the pacing of the show, which begins with cutout polka-dot-like photocopied shapes, the start of an installation of Collier Schorr’s enactment of Chantal Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle. Next to Schorr is work by Ari Marcopoulos, printed on disparate surfaces as if he’d grabbed the paper nearest at hand. A wall filled with a rush of seemingly unrelated portraits presented off the cuff, a glimpse of an omnivorous mind, energized and decidedly unresolved.

All of which is to say, “Hard Copy” starts jauntily, setting the visitor off balance. By the time you’ve moved into the main room, with its large-scale printouts, it’s an almost soothing experience. Ah, photocopies. Exactly what you pictured, so to speak, as you purchased a ticket for the show.

Accumulation, shifts in scale, and the content of the work itself orchestrate the energy of the exhibition experience. Wild bursts of movement both demonstrated and implied: David Black’s galloping horses, John Divola’s “Dogs Chasing My Cars in the Desert,” the eruptive potential of Takashi Homma’s Mount Fuji, and the tangling tongues and splayed legs of Thomas Ruff’s “Nudes.”

At the ICP talk, Gray Sorrenti explained that for the past 10 years, she’s been taking screenshots of FaceTime calls with her loved ones, and the floor-to-ceiling assemblage of that collection — a chaotic photo album at wall size — both pays tribute to our modern age and subverts it. Instead of drugstore-printed images behind cellophane in a photo album stored for posterity, disposable images have been printed, made material, and mounted in a show. No longer scrollable, forgettable.

The embodiment of the show’s concept is arguably Aaron Stern’s 16-foot collage of work by some of the participating artists, a thrilling composition of repeated images, unfettered interpretations, layering, and gleeful abundance. Transcending the medium by fully embracing it, his collage feels like something alive — and, perhaps most profoundly, it feels like something new.

“Hard Copy New York” is on view at ICP through May 4.