Group Curatorial Project

We were assigned groups at the beginning of the term, for this Group Curatorial Project. Basically an exercise in curating a small show, each week four different groups of students ranging across 2d 3d and 4d are assigned a space, and given about 3 days to either curate a small showing of their works and/or collaborate on something new.

Our group only got together at the tech meeting the wednesday prior to the monday that we were going to be showing, so we didn't have that much time. Since we didn't know eachother we spent the first day checking out eachother's studios trying to discuss themes in our work or just brainstorm and try to find commonalities. Everyone seemed to have a body of work they were drawing from, especially Ashley and Scarlett who are painters.
Being that I came here with no work really to show, once I found out that I was going to be showing early on, I began working on a field-recording piece with the idea that I would install it in the rapidly approaching group curatorial project. While it was good that I had something together by the time we were meeting, it did kind of limit me in terms of being able to create a work that reacted to other people, or making a fresh kind of collaboration. That said, I do think that the piece fits in with some of the themes of invasion, imagined landscape, and division that we spoke about.

The room we were assigned (the "Guggenheim" space, as its known) is kind of crap - a white cube shaped room thats more of a corridor than anything else. It has doors on three walls, and serves as the connection point between two hallways, the bathroom, and one other project space. It has a tall ceiling, which I immeidiately noticed makes it a pretty loud room, as voices and other sounds seem to travel upwards and bounce around in kind of a raw echo.

Friday we did the install, basically all day. Rugina got working on a wool installation, kind of a continuation of some other wool pieces she had been doing recently.


I helped her a lot as my piece was already done - I just had to set up the stereo and speakers. Scarlett and Ashley brought various pieces of their work down from their studios, trying things out in the space, seeing what resonated. The wool was stretched across the room at about my eye level, physically dividing the space, forcing people to duck and go slowly through the room that is normally quite a passageway. It also constituted a fire hazard, and being attached to a pipe, made use of "building fixtures," to the moderate ire of the maintenance staff. (Basically they told us we had to take it down and we said 'fuck it' and left it until Monday. worked out fine.) Though we were wrapping it so tightly that the pipe was bending, threatening to burst sewage everywhere.


We ended up including one of Scarlett's paintings, this kind of grassy patch. All of her work is really really thick oil paints, they take months (like 8-10) to dry. We all liked that it was basically so thick (and also that its just painted on a thick wood board) that it becomes sculptural - looks like mini world, prime for macro-lens photos. Initally talked about displaying it on the floor (I think out of a combination of indecision, laziness, lack of ability to hang paintings, and no one having much balls in terms of making editorial/curatorial decisions on all of our parts), we ended up putting it on a small shelf underneath Ashley's painting, the kind of grassy hill to the latter's cloud-like hues.


when Dan (finally) showed up, he was doing the final construction on his floating paper cube. Stitchin each edge together was a bit arduous, and he was unsure if he had enough helium between his dozen balloons to get her afloat.


It was enough lift, with two balloons to spare as reserves in case it had become grounded by Monday's crit. A victory sandwich was in order.
For the installation of Invasive Species, I decided to set up the speakers outside of the Guggenheim space, thus that they would be out of sight when you were in the room itself. The speakers were aimed back towards the room, and with the sound source unseen, seemed to bounce around in the high ceiling and really fill up the space.

right channel, from the door

The effect was nice - you could hear the bird sounds very clearly within the room, and even pick out the points in space that they seemed to be coming from, except there would be nothing there. It was much like my own experience in the field, where I could always here the birds but rarely see them. I also think having the speakers hidden made the sound environment seem even more 'natural,' and people were less likely to consider that some of the sounds were in fact me, chirping away out in the bushes. You can download the file here.

Overall, I was pleased with the show. It was quick, definitely more of an assignment than a true collaboration. A lot of that came out in the critique discussion - the fact that a large portion of the learning was about how to try to be diplomatic, polite, not step on anyones toes, and yet make strong decisions in our curation, try to really present a cohesive body of work. I think since we only met a few days before the show itself, we were all hesitant to try to build something completely new, or make strong opinions about the quality of each other's work or tastes.