Covid-related lockdowns affected many exhibiting artists as galleries and exhibition venues were forced to close and artworks sat unseen. Artists found alternative internet-based platforms to exhibit their work. These platforms varied from curated webpages to immersive virtual gallery spaces. However, there were many artists who did not have a web presence, either by choice or didn’t have the technical knowledge or confidence to create one. Stephen Clarke, an artist and lecturer, based at the University of Chester, was one such person.
Stephen’s photography project, ‘Alien Resident’ was exhibited at CASC Gallery, Chester over lockdown and was subsequently closed to the public. This led me to approach him and propose a collaboration as a way of getting his work out there and give me the chance to respond to his work and design and build a bespoke virtual gallery for it.
This is the result... Drive Thru'
In the main, leading curators and critics often warn against including artists in the active process of curation and design of their exhibitions. Robert Storr says that the reasons for this source of friction are that ‘some artists are very good, flexible, and creative… Quite a few are not, but only some of them are aware of it. Touching on the finer points of exhibition design he goes on to correctly identify another potential point of friction, that the curator has to take the (hard learned) idiosyncrasies of the site into consideration, but that an artist cannot necessarily make the best decisions for placing their artworks because they are rarely immersed within the space they are going to exhibit.
Very often, a curator must find a compromise between the artist's wishes, the artworks, the gallery and the viewer and having the ability to change one of those areas can make that compromise easier to achieve and in this instance, the gallery was a complete creation in response to Stephen’s work, meant that I was able to address some of his concerns along the way, showed that these potential areas of friction did not materialise. A compromise did not need to be made.
If you are reading this blog and feel you can add something to my research then please comment… even if you are correcting me or don’t agree with something that I say.
