Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Installation, Photography, Sound, Conceptual Art, Research
Website: charliemacquarie.com
Charlie Macquarie is an artist, archivist, and radio amateur born in Berkeley, California and raised in Carson City, Nevada. He studied English in college before building a career as a library and information professional, working at institutions including Columbia University, the New York City Transit Authority, and UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. He later served as Digital Archivist at the University of California, San Francisco, and is a library research fellow and librarian in residence at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. He is based in Oakland on Huchiun, Lisjan (Ohlone) land.
From 2016 to 2021, Macquarie co-organized PLACE TALKS alongside Nicole Lavelle — a visual lecture series held at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco that brought together Bay Area artists, writers, designers, architects, archivists, and librarians around themes of place and location-based inquiry. He holds an amateur radio license (call sign KN6HLC), and a radio amateur’s curiosity about transmission, frequency, and interference runs throughout his practice.
Macquarie works across images, publications, document collections, sound recordings, transmissions, scene reports, syllabi, environmental impact statements, computer code, and technical documentation. His practice centers on cultural inquiries into the historical toxins and byproducts of extractive capital, using landscape and the built environment as direction-finding technologies. He is drawn to contact zones between past and present — the places where infrastructure, ecology, and human history overlap in ways that are messy, non-linear, and incomplete.
His best-known project, the Library of Approximate Location, takes the form of small-scale, site-specific digital and physical libraries installed at unconventional sites across the American West — missile launch facilities, bombing ranges, cold-water geysers, strip clubs, abandoned copper mines, tufa towers, farms, and rock and mineral shows. The project proposes alternative networks and resource management practices, presenting documentation without interpretation and embracing the incomplete nature of all collections. His ongoing project Telephone Hills records and documents radio communications and infrastructures of the oil industry in California on Ohlone, Chumash, and Yokuts land, remixing these transmissions into audio-visual work that grapples with climate change and energy transition while centering the voices of oil workers.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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