Opening of the Exhibition

The opening of the exhibition went really well, a lot of people came and the feedback seemed to be good. One of the issues that a few of the people that I chatted to was the lack of explanation or title next to the pieces. This was a major problem that seemed to have been completely overlooked by the curators, even after we submitted an artist's statement and a title for our pieces. Ideally I would have liked to have my artist's statement displayed next to my piece, or at least my title 'Carcinoma Series' - just to hint at the idea behind the work. Or the statements could have been printed up in a small leaflets easily, similar to the ones handed out at the opening, if people did not want text next to their pieces. The fact that there was no explanation with the works meant that a lot of the ideas were lost and the audience was left confused by some of the pieces - basing whether they liked the pieces on purely aesthetics.

The idea behind my final pieces was to take something horrible, in this case brain cancer, and make it seem beautiful and for people to admire it. The fact that the drawings were cancer was significant to create some intrigue into the pieces, however without the title displayed the fact that these weren't just healthy MRI scans was lost.

One successful part of the pieces I presented was the engagement with the audience. I forced people to get close to my pieces, wanting to break the invisible barrier often found in the gallery space between the viewer and art. I wanted to get the viewer to get as close as possible, so using a magnifying glass and removing the glass from the frames I encouraged them to do this. I had also been looking at how other tiny pieces of art had been displayed and really liked the way that Adele Lack had presented her 'Small Miracles' micropaintings. Initially I had the magnifying glass mounted onto the wall using pins, however this made the glass look like it was part of the piece and I was afraid this would deter the audience from using it. This is why I decided to use a small white shelf attached to the wall below the frames to sit the magnifying glass on. This was really effective, and whilst observing the viewers interacting with my work I noticed that almost everyone picked up the magnifying glass straight away. One problem that I hadn't considered was the fact that the wall behind was made of plasterboard, so was not thick enough to hold the screws into the wall, and therefore the screws were not solid enough to hold the shelf straight. This meant that at the opening the shelf was wobbly and was slipping forward off the supports. The Friday after the opening I had to go into the space and try and figure out how to attach my shelf more effectively, the major problem being that I couldn't use brackets because of the plaster board. In the end I used a very strong adhesive to join the back of the shelf to the wall, and then painting over any places where the glue was visible.

Please Do Not Touch

The image below was another piece at the exhibition at Harewood House, one that I think epitomises what I said in a previous post about the audience being kept at a distance from the artwork. The sign at the bottom says 'Please Do Not Touch' and is a phrase I'm tired of seeing at galleries. Throughout my experience as an artist I have been constantly aware of texture in my pieces, as have most other artists. Texture is one of the most important things in art and being forbidden from touching a piece or getting close enough to see the detail means that you cant often experience the art to its full extent.

Harewood House

I went to Harewood House over the weekend to have a look at the exhibitions that they had on at the moment. It was a really interesting venue, in rooms of the massive stately home. I found it a bit bizarre that the galleries were at the end of the tour of the house, so one minute you're in an old house with Victorian furnishings and the next you're in another room converted into a modern gallery space. The exhibition took place in two rooms which led to a third room which was a cafe. This all seemed a bit disjointed, like the exhibition was an afterthought and had been put in the only available rooms. Something we have had to consider while planning our final exhibits is the space in which we are displaying it. The fact that it is in a shopping center, in a shop that has closed down, has to correlate to our work in some way. I didn't realise until going to Harewood House that an exhibition in a place that is not a traditional white cube gallery is actually quite difficult to pull off.

The way the pieces of work were hung was interesting too. Quite a few of the pieces had been attached to the wall using small bulldog clips or pins. As the pieces were quite small themselves this worked really well. The pieces seemed to hang in the air and the colour was not lost against the black walls.

A common way that pieces were hung was by wire or chains from the ceiling. The transparent wire was really effective as although you could see it, it worked with the piece and as they were all parallel they didn't detract from the work at all.

The pieces that were hung by the chains were more grand pieces, in large frames, mostly in the period style rooms within the house itself. This meant that the paintings had more of an impact on the room, drawing the viewer to it with ostentatious gold frames and chains. This technique of hanging didn't work that well on some of the pieces, especially the smaller, subtle paintings as they were drowned out by the grandeur of the display. I found that I preferred the pieces where you couldn't actually see the hanging mechanism - where the frames had been mounted onto the wall at the back and lay flat against it. This method meant that you weren't distracted at all from the art itself and is something I want to achieve in the way I display my work.

Displaying my work

My final piece for the exhibition is going to be a series of microscopic images created by drawing onto a paper that shrinks when heated. My plan is to display them framed, alongside photographs taken with a microscope so that the detail can be seen with the naked eye. I have also been looking into a way of being able to view the pieces directly through a microscope.

I found these display cases by Jerry Elford, which are individually designed for viewing microscopic pieces of artwork. They are really inventive and a mean that the pieces aren't lost in the gallery space.

This is a problem that I have to consider, as a lot of the pieces exhibited by other people will be larger and more eye-catching.
The initial idea behind my final piece came from wanting to encourage the audience to look closer at artwork, getting as close to the piece as possible, something which is often frowned upon in art galleries. The gallery experience for me is somewhat ruined by the rope and alarms making sure you don't get too close, touch or steal any of the artwork. You can feel alienated from the work - as if you're kept at a distance, making sure that every artist has to fight the urge to feel the textures in the paint.
Jerry Elford's display cases enclose delicate and tiny pieces of work, with built in microscopes so that the audience can view the pieces easily but with as little physical interaction as possible. This is why I don't want to use a method like this to display my pieces. I want the audience to feel involved with the work and not feel like they're separate from the art experience.

Banksy - Exit Through The Gift Shop

Yesterday, I went to see the new Banksy film at Hyde Park Picture House. The basic story behind the film is that of a mental guy with a video camera trying to document the work and life of graffiti artist Banksy. The film is presented well, in a documentary style, covering the lifestyle of many famous street artists and its growing popularity in modern culture. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the film and it gave me an insight into the world of street art, however if you are going to see this film as an attempt to shed some light on the mystery of Banksy and want to find out something about him that weren't aware of then you will be disappointed. The fact that Banksy 'made' this film is somewhat irrelevant and seems like his name has just been attached to the film to promote sales and popularity.

I found the most interesting and relevant part of this film was when the film maker turned street artist know as MBW (Mr BrainWash) attempts to set up his own exhibition in a huge abandoned space with very little experience and knowledge of the art scene. From start to finish he seemed to have no idea about how to go about making the exhibition a success. His venue was a large abandoned building of which he used about 6 large rooms all with different themes, similar to how we are exhibiting. At one stage towards the end he sought the help of a couple of promoters who went around the venue deciding what needed to be done, how and when. They made a good point that we need to consider, which is that one room looked finished and perfect, however this made the other rooms look rubbish in comparison. We need to ensure that the quality of both the physical walls and paint finish, and the work itself, is consistent throughout all the rooms.

Most of the physical work was done by a team of builders and artists who could work with the space for a couple of months, tailoring it to MBWs particular preferences. This will be a major issue with our exhibition I think, because of the limited time scale we have to hang the pieces. Due to having an extra week to complete our work it will only leave us with two days in which to focus entirely on the setting up of the exhibition, a very small period of time. This means that most of us will be aiming to complete all our work to the highest standard before even thinking properly about the physical things that need to happen to the space to make it a success.

The most interesting point of the exhibition that he put on, for me, was the fact that it was such a huge success, not because of the nature of the work, or the art itself, but the fact that Banksy had promoted it. The general public had no idea who Mr Brainwash was until one article in LA Today, and a giant billboard with a quote from Banksy himself; 'Mr Brainwash is a force of nature, he's a phenomenon. And I don't mean that in a good way.' This instant affiliation with the most successful street artist of all time meant that his exhibition was almost bound to be an instant success, especially when most of his work is simply ripping off other street artists' work. Maybe this is what we need for our exhibition, a press release from a famous artist to justify our validate our exhibition. The overnight success of MBW also provokes the question in every artists mind, what makes you a success? The fellow street artists seemed to be very annoyed and dismissing of MBW by the end of the film and the fact that the public were lapping up his work which had no context or thought behind it at all. He managed to sell over a million dollars worth of work in the first week with no artistic background and no real grip on reality, even being commissioned to do the album cover of Madonna's greatest hits.

Ideas for Posters

Some rough ideas for marketing material, I've just being playing around with images from the internet, as we have decided on the title 'Lost Property.' Marketing have decided that we are going to use luggage labels for lots of the promotional material, and use old flyers painted over and stamped instead of paying for new flyers to be printed. Still playing round with a logo as we have found a picture online of a Polish Lost Property sign but I still need to re-draw/design it because at the moment the image is very small and pixelated. The fonts used were just the first ones that I clicked on, but we were thinking about using one from dafont.com which Jonny found and works really well. Also I haven't put all the details that we want, times, place etc as these are just rough trials.

Feedback for our show

When I was at the gallery in Leeds University I noticed that they had a wall where people could post their comments about the exhibition. This has become a really common thing for galleries to do to try and work out what the public likes, and how to resolve any problems there may be. I found the most interesting wall of feedback I have seen was at the Turner Prize two years ago because people were so opinionated about it, there was such a huge variety of comments that it was so intriguing to read, however wouldn't have been very productive to the curators and artists. There are lots of ways to obtain feedback for an exhibition but the audience needs to feel like it is fun for them to do, or they are becoming part of the exhibition which is something we need to carefully consider.

My proposed Idea for Final Exhibition

My work at the moment is based around using various unusual painting techniques to recreate images of diseased cells, primarily cancer cells. I want to draw the audience into my work and look at the details in my pieces as this was something that I don't feel happens enough in galleries. You are always aware that there is a person sat in the corner watching your every move to ensure you don't tamper with the work or try to steal it, which often results in the viewer being wary of getting too close to the work. At the start of my project I was creating strips of paper with prints going down, changing each time the print lost some paint. The changes were very subtle as well as the intricate marks made and required the viewer to peer very closely into the paint, however when presenting my work in crits and tutorials I found that the audience stood too far away for the detail to be seen. I contemplated the idea of creating tiny pieces so that the audience would have no choice but to go right up to the work, but I decided that the work might seem very lost in a room with other larger pieces. I then thought about combining the idea of cells and microscopy.

For my final piece I want to create some microscope slides of my own either with tiny designs of my own on, or just samples of paint mixed with unusual substances to see what the structure looks like. Ideally I would like to paint the structure of a cancer cell and then somehow shrink it onto a piece of glass so that it looks like an original cancer slide. In reality I don't know how feasible this is, and may end up just using real slides bought off the internet. I also want to paint approximately 3 large paintings of my interpretation of cells to hang. Ultimately I will need a plinth with a microscope on it and a place to store the slides, and some wall space to hang my paintings. Depending on the type of microscope I can get hold of I will probably have to have a socket close by too.

More ways to display work

It's really weird how as soon as you start thinking about how a piece of work is hung, it is all you can think about! I went into the University Gallery at the Uni of Leeds and was really intrigued by the methods they had used to hang the work. It was mostly paintings of previous students in Leeds and most were hung in the same way - with a screw system attached to the back of the pieces. These were either screwed directly into the walls or then attached to a wire and suspended from the top of the board/wall. It was really interesting to see that they had used the same fixings for both types of hanging, obviously to save both money and time. These are very sturdy mechanisms for supporting the pieces as a lot of them were very old pieces in heavy ostentatious gold frames! This is also something we have to consider when we display our work as a whole - the framing of pieces. In this exhibition I did notice that because of the difference in size, style and shape, the frames the works seemed slightly mishmashed. I think framing is often unnecessary and we will need to think about what frames, if any, are suitable for all our work to ensure that there is some consistency.

I also considered the lighting in the gallery. This picture makes it seem very dark, however it was actually very well lit. The windows had been covered by a semi transparent blind so the light was still getting through but without the distractions of the outside. There were long sections in the ceiling with numerous lights side by side, some were on and some weren't depending on the works around, the direction they were pointing was also adjustable. I think this worked really well, as it can be changed for each exhibition without too much problem, and the light can be directed at the pictures in any way to suit the work. There were also some pieces that had extra lighting pointing at the work which was mounted on the wall alongside the piece. I also noticed that the descriptions of the pieces were stuck on the walls/plinths with a foam sticky square like you get on birthday cards! This meant that they were raised off the wall, or the plinth to make more of a feature and to make it more inviting to the viewer. There was one sculpture where the description was just stuck onto the plinth and this gave an unprofessional air to the work, it looked as though there had been another piece of work there previously and no one had taken the time to present it properly.

Ways to hang work

While we were in the exhibition space I was looking at the way the window display was hung. In one of the units the artist had suspended their work by getting a piece of fishwire and punching 2 wholes in the top of their work to loop the wire through. These were then attached to the ceiling by a hook. I didn't like this technique, because although at was virtually invisible from a distance, once you got close enough it looked pretty amateur. As you can see in the picture there was still a length of wire that wasn't cut off, and the work now permanently has small holes in it.

I preferred the way of hanging shown below. The artist had made the fixings more of a feature, rather than trying to make it invisible and failing like above. They had clamped small bulldog clips attached to fishing wire to their pieces and suspended them from the ceiling again. Unfortunately we could not go inside this Unit so I could not see how they were attached to the ceiling, but I would imagine it would be a similar technique again. I think the reason this way of hanging works better than the one above is because it makes a feature out of the clips, they are stylised and fit well with the work. The wire in the pieces above seems like it wasn't considered for a vast amount of time, the wire is just tied to keep it in place, the work has been defaced to hang it, and they seem to have failed in their attempt to make the fixings invisible. Weirdly the bulldog clips seem less noticeable than the fishing wire as they work with the photographs presented.