Call 1: The Lift Gallery - Report

Call 1 – The Lift Gallery

The Artwork

Being on the curatorial team for Call 1 – the Lift Gallery was a valuable and rich experience, and became the focus of this call for me, as opposed to the work I submitted for the Gallery. I deliberately proposed a piece for this project that I knew I could work on both within the short timeframe, and while also being a part of the curatorial team. The piece revolved mainly around reading and research which made it something that I could work around other commitments.

The benefit of working in this way was that the research I carried out and the resulting work was so directly linked to my current artistic practice. I like the metaphor of seeing my working practice as a big box of things, or ingredients that I can choose an element from at any time to explore and play with. The ingredient that I chose for this piece was the fascination that I found with the moon during a recent project – The Big Walk – which I could further explore and expand upon; the method of presentation/medium i.e. wall-based montage seeming most appropriate for this area of exploration.

Curating

I found the task of curating the show as part of a team very different to how I had expected. I discovered that a lot of the work was in organisation and communicating with the artists and other curators as clearly as possible, a task that was not always easy.

As the member of the team who was sending t he majority of the emails – a job I was happy to do – I encountered several problems in communicating with other members of the group. I think several people felt that emails were impersonal and that they should have been addressed personally regarding issues/things that needed to be resolved, however, despite these issues, I still believe that emails are the most efficient and professional method of communication, and to try and track down everyone that I needed to speak to would be impractical and unnecessary, especially as we all keep different timetables.

I am aware that there were some issues that could have been resolved; particularly if there had been more time to work on this project, which unfortunately there wasn’t. For example, the decision to make flyers to advertise the private view was made 5 days before the private view, which included a weekend. We made the decision to design the flyer and get it out as soon as possible in order to best promote the event and the exhibition, which mean that it would have been impractical to involve other members of course, as a response was neither guaranteed, nor likely.
This decision led to me putting a note about one of the artist’s pieces – which was one of the few interactive/’live’ pieces in the show – on the flyer which she had not approved, and which left the artist feeling uninvolved and upset.

If the artist feels that her work has been misrepresented by the comment about her piece in the flyer then this is very serious, and a definite oversight on my part. Because of time constraints it just wasn’t feasible to run the flyer by her and expect a response in time to get it out by Monday morning, and this led to the flyer containing a comment that she hadn’t approved. In hindsight I understand that the correct decision in this situation would have been to make no comment about her work at all. In my desire not to offend the artist by leaving mention of their interactive piece out of the flyer, I made an error of judgement and advertised her piece in a way that I believed was appropriate based on the artist’s statement, and hearing them talk about their piece, which left the artist feeling, rightly so, angry about her work being misunderstood not only by myself, but by anybody who sees the promo.

The actual curating/arrangement of the show was an enjoyable, interpretive and intuitive process, which I think particularly worked well working as a group, because, despite some disagreements, it made discussion and compromise necessary and interesting. The space was very small, and an unusual area to work with, which again inspired compromise and prompted us to rethink and arrange work not only considering the pieces relationship to each other, but to the space, and coming up with some unconventional positioning. This process was an interesting comparison to the curating of The Big Walk show in the Lobby gallery; a different kind of show in terms of content, but the same in many ways; too much work, too little space; work of a very varied nature; awkward gallery space – stairs, doors etc... The results, despite a few to-be-expected hiccups, was satisfying, and for want of a better word, seemed to ‘click’.

I think that the issues we encountered after the fact of installing with regards to artists’ feelings towards the placement of their work is possibly an inevitable reality. It’s my belief that we were all considerate with the work, and personally asked each artist to attend the install at allotted times in order to discuss the placement of their work, but ultimately, decision making is the role of the curator.

It has been my intention throughout to conduct myself professionally, and efficiently. There has been repeated mention of the curatorial group not addressing other members of the group/discussing new information in person, however in order to work on this project as efficiently as possible, time has been of the essence, and it has simply not been possible to discuss projects/issues individually or in person. The students that have had issues with their work/equipment have been contacted my email and the curatorial team has devoted time to, and done their best to resolve any problems, and it’s my opinion that emailing has been the most appropriate format for this kind of communication, if not the most personal.