Unclassied Gesture (2025)
Mixed media, mail intervention, bumper stickers, digital correspondence
In Unclassied Gesture, Christopher DeLoach orchestrates a distributed performance at the intersection of bureaucracy, pop culture, and public will. The work consists of a mass mailing of custom bumper stickers—each emblazoned with the phrase “RELEASE THE FILES”—sent individually to every sitting member of the United States Congress. Accompanied by an image of “Clippy,” Microsoft’s once-ubiquitous digital assistant, the gesture transforms nostalgia for obsolete interfaces into a vehicle of civic address. Through the framework of administrative language and familiar design, Unclassied Gesture operates as both institutional critique and cultural mirror. The artist situates the work within traditions of mail art, participatory democracy, and conceptual humor, invoking the aesthetics of governmental communication while subverting its opacity. By mobilizing an object as commonplace as a bumpersticker, the project foregrounds the tension between mass expression and bureaucratic containment—the civic desire to know, to see, to be acknowledged. The title itself—Unclassied Gesture—suggests a paradox: an action seeking visibility within a system dened by withholding. Neither activism nor parody, the work exists in a liminal state between earnest request and conceptual performance, asking what forms of transparency remain possible within contemporary institutions of power.