Clearance Archive is a studio, archive, and storefront operating within the conditions of late-stage capitalism and social collapse. The project examines how objects move through culture—how they are produced, used, discarded, repaired, and remembered—and what those movements reveal about labor, value, care, and survival.
At its core, Clearance Archive treats maintenance as a central cultural act. Rather than framing care, repair, and reuse as secondary or invisible labor, the project positions them as essential forms of meaning-making. Through restoration, reconfiguration, documentation, and display, objects are understood not as static commodities, but as carriers of time, use, and social relation.
The storefront functions as both gallery and archive. Working within e-commerce is a deliberate choice: in the present moment, systems of exchange hold greater cultural reach than traditional art institutions. Clearance Archive adopts commerce as a site of inquiry rather than endorsement—using listings, pricing, and description as tools to study how value is assigned, contested, and transformed. Each object functions as a record of labor and circulation rather than a product optimized for desire.
The project is sustained through an ongoing custodial practice. The Custodian section documents the labor required to maintain the Archive: care work, repair, administrative tasks, research, writing, and long-term stewardship. Custodianship is not presented as a neutral role, but as an active, ethical position—one that acknowledges responsibility, limits, and interdependence. This work makes visible the often unseen labor required to keep cultural material accessible, legible, and in circulation.
Clearance Archive is not fixed in form. Over time, the Archive is intended to grow into a collective exhibition: a living index of objects, practices, and contributions that reflect shared conditions of excess, exhaustion, care, and adaptation. Rather than producing new material endlessly, the project works with what already exists—repairing, recontextualizing, and holding space for what might otherwise be forgotten.
Clearance Archive exists within the paradox of the present moment: both participant in, and response to, systems in collapse. It operates as a site of maintenance, study, and continuity—asking what can be carried forward from the present into archive, and how care itself might function as a form of cultural practice.