CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION is a collaborative exhibition by Zachary Fabri and Emily B. Frank (2024 Fellows), which considers the generative interplay of art making and art conservation. 

Fabri and Frank present an exhibition that displays the collaborative relay in their iterative process and challenges the boundaries of their respective disciplines. They are concerned with how ideas move (and have continuity) and change (and are mutable) through (a generative process of) art making and conservation. A vital element of their collaboration is exploring the way that these two practices bleed into each other as modes of telling stories and conveying ideas. 

Organized chronologically by iteration, the exhibition reveals the processual continuity and mutability of their ideas in materials. From the initial seed artwork to the final installation, visitors will experience how conservation and art making are intertwined and blur traditionally conceived boundaries, shaping and reshaping the narrative along the way. Concerns and questions that are woven into the collaborative exhibition include: 

- The ways that art making can be conceived of as a kind of conservation. 

- The ways that conservation practice can be understood to generate art. 

- How definitions limit the way conservation and art are distinguished. 

- How narrative is an essential part of how materials are harnessed in both artistic and conservation outputs.

Bio

Emily B. Frank is an objects and sculpture conservator working in New York City. She received an MA in Principles of Conservation from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and an MS and an MA in Conservation of Artistic and Historic Works and History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. Emily works as a conservator in her private practice, on a number of archaeological projects throughout the Mediterranean, and in a museum context at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum. She lectures in conservation at the Conservation Center at NYU, and she is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University.