So i want to be a curator ....

The curation aspect is present within my work i guess its present within everyone's work up to a point, we all have that idea in our heads of how we would like our work to be displayed and i guess that a part of me is unwilling to let someone else decide that for me, so the impulse to not let someone else make that decision has led to me think of curation as a possible career or route. From my experience on the A4 exhibition i found that i was up to this challenge, and during the preparation for our final major show i will be taking on roles on the curation team, the core team, the promotion team and general organising of the final show. With the Final show as the end point of exhibitions for this last brief i plan to stage a series of events or exhibitions in the run up to it. Using the knowledge i gained from the 'exhibition and show brief' i intend to play with the idea of exhibiting my work in different ways. By again using the street as a gallery and to exhibit my own and others work as well as exploring the student art scene in Leeds.

How i will do this

So far i have talked to a number of students and artist's i am already familiar with i have outlined my aims, and we have talked about the avenues open to us, at the moment we are still at the talking stage of how we will approach this, whether we apply for a space we can use for an exhibition or where we in fact create work that can be shown outside is a sticking point. I plan to do both, to use the same work in both settings- i have set a deadline for work to be submitted to me by the end of march so that i can find a space to use and invite people to come to an exhibition that is advertised and will become a one off show, i then plan to change the way the work is viewed after the event and create a street gallery which will be accessible to the public as they go about their daily lives- that is to say it will simply be their for them to see rather than something they are invited to see- i like the idea of invading their space.

In an effort to see how the curation process works i have also volunteered at PSL- Project space Leeds which i will attend once a week during the whole time i am undertaking this project. Also i have contacted F.A.C.T in Liverpool to have a week shadowing their head curator during the easter period. As well as these efforts i will also attend art events within and around Leeds to gain an understanding of how events as these are currently run and in the hope that i will get the chance to talk with event managers and artists that currently show their works in these ways.
http://www.projectspaceleeds.org.uk/
http://www.fact.co.uk/
/http://leedsartwalk.wordpress.com/
http://www.umbrellacreative.co.uk/about.html

places i go wrong

The processes i employ are often labourious ones, which is not an intentional thing, on reflection its something i do in an effort to feel closer to the work. The time i spend on individual pieces can be lengthy, when i speak to other students about their own work they are often shocked that i spend as much time as i do on individual pieces, i don't know whether this is because the time spend on a piece doesn't reflect on the finished article or whether it is due to the shock that i've wasted that much time on a piece of work that i will then never use again or that i will simply throw away. For me its about ownership if i do something which takes a short amount of time to complete then it genraly feels of no value to me, i want to put everything i have in to a piece and when i look at it i want to remember the sleepless nights and the hours or days i have spent getting something right that no one else will even notice i want it to be mine- and then i want to leave it for someone else to find. I don't really see why i do this i just know its a part it all somehow and it doesn't always work as i have planned- during the last brief i spent weeks gold leafing a found window frame, to get it perfect to cover every mm of the surface in the attempt to show it in a new light, and i was aware of all the connotations that surrounded what i was doing - but i didn't know where the impulse to do it had come from,rather than questioning or fully exploring why i was doing it i simply carried on. Once i had finished i didn't know what to do with it, i didn't what to really do anything with it so i just put it back where i found it- took some really awful documenting photographs and left it at that. i guess i told that story because i know what i did makes no sense and that is how i can be some times i'll just give up and leave an idea without fully exploring it- something which i cannot do during this brief- i need to fully realise my goals and to do this every piece i create also needs fully curating. With this in mind i will time table myself, it was pointed out to me that i work better when i have a deadline that must be realised so i feel the only way to do this is to give my self actual deadlines that i must work to, because this brief will be about not just creating work but as i said before also curating it. Finding those platforms in which i want to exhibit.

Themes and points of interest within my own work.

A thing that is apparent to me within my work is that although their are running themes throughout it, it doesn't always seem clear at first- most of the time i don't even understand the reasons behind what im doing when i first start. sometimes it is the sheer act of making an object that appeals to me and other times it is the use of a found object and the different ways in which it can be presented. But their are certain points which are re-occurring.

The viewers reaction or participation within or around a piece of art has always been a driving factor, that is to say i am always aware that their should be a different way of approaching it, this is mainly because i am interested in how people see art whether its inside a gallery setting or outside of one. My approach reguarding this is to try different ways that i can make work that conflicts to the 'normal' way of showing work. Playing with scale- by making the viewer bend down to get closer to the piece because its in miniature or  to stand back because its a large wall piece, including them in it or removing them from it.

Art on the street, during a few of my briefs i have been placing work to be found or happened upon  by people who are not actually looking to see work, i was watching a documantary in which Street artist Ben Eines said that, "if people want to see art, they go to a gallery"this stuck with me as it was once true people did but the time for that is at an end, we are constantly bombarded with culture these days and its that which i find an interesting point to explore. As people alive during a time in which information is readily available and culture seems to be a commodity and art is big business how do artists step away from that? How do i make a work of art that is outside of a culture that see's artwork as a product? If i want to make something that has a small audience that maybe connects to a few people or just to get people to see a piece that in someway shares the excitement i had making it then i need to explore new platforms for showing it. With this as an aim i plan to use my final brief to explore different ways of exploring the new wave of street art and the different ways of exhibiting work on the street to fully understand why i want to put my work outside of a traditional gallery setting, and what is it about a gallery setting that i find lacking? to do this i will produce work to be placed in both, that is on the street and within a gallery context in the hope that i can explore the differences.

Processes 

I enjoy working with different materials but often i come back to the same easily accessible materials and ways of creating work that it in many respects accidental, the use of stop frame animation appeals to me bacause i like the easy nature of it, the jerkyness that often comes with a stop frame short creates a quick way in which to get a message across to a viewer which is easily accepted. By this what im trying to say is that its a playful way to show an opinion which is easily accessable no matter what the theme or the context. This is a link to my stop frame short that i used in my fmp pitch,

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150403109265156&oid=181130471919519&comments

 which was later used on the college website as a way to promote my current course the response i had from it was very positive, people who have seen it like it- i'm not sure if i'm happy because people like something i have made or because i am happy that people have simply watched it and had any kind of reaction to it? either way i plan to use this current brief to make more stop frame shorts. By exhibiting within and outside of a gallery setting i can explore how people access work. A part of my FMP is a collaboration with fellow student Becky Elliot in which we plan to explore the showing of films within different institutional settings culminating in a show that we create ourselves outside of any institution, not only will we both use this to explore the curation side of exhibiting work, it will afford us a glimpse into the different reactions that film work produces when introduced in different ways in differing settings- if the context of how a piece is shown reacts with the content of the work and how far the surroundings effect it. 

 

The Exhibition of A4...

In december as a part of our course we put on an open submission exhibition, in which i took on the role of a curator as part of the curation team, this allowed me an insight in to the workings that go on behind the scenes so to speak. It's fair to say it was a lot more work than i expected, it may have been a bit nieve of me to think it, but i thought that it would be a simple matter of deciding what went where, and what work impacted on others and what work complimented others- no so. Instead i spent a week listening to the students that had submitted tell me i was wrong and that their work should be here or there and they needed to do it this way or even that they didn't have the work done yet but they would, and although sometimes i was disheartened by the responses of artists who had created work or in some cases a lack of response from them, it also made me stand up for what i thought, in many ways i felt confident in this role. I enjoyed getting it done and done on time. I felt that i had an envolvement in each component of this exhibition and i plan to carry it on with reguards to our final end of year show and within my own work.

The moment i decided i wanted to curate....

This exhibition is what made me interested in the curation-side of things, SK-interfaces was a colllaborative exhibition that was undertaken by 22 artists and 3 curators. The aim of which was to explore new developments in creative technologies, processes, forms and potential languages. The exhibition presented a number of artists who are utilizing a set of un-common tools to comment on the evolution of our human futures.I found this exhibition to be quite an unusual one as it is the unifying theme of the exploration into new technologies that makes them a collaborative, each of the featured artists displays their pieces and the curators have succeeded in bringing them together in a way that is at once unifying but separate. Walking around this exhibition gave me that sense of - i wish i could do this, but for the first time ever i wanted to bring the artists together instead of being an artist myself. What i took away from this exhibition was more than just an amazing exhibition book, it was a sense of a different option for myself.
This is the amazing exhibition book which uses an aspect of the exhibition - Thermocromatic ink, which reacts to heat

It's the culmination of all the separate parts of the exhibition that i feel make it so strong, the curators have obviously worked exceedingly hard and well to produce a show that leaves the viewers imagination alive with the possibilities.

What i want to do and why.....

I thought that coming to art school would make it clear at least in my own head what i want to do creatively in the future, so far thats not the case. I still am not quite sure, but this blog will show my attempts to decide or at least help me to come up with ideas. At the moment i'm trying to focus on the curational side of the art world, i think this is where my strengths lie but at the same time i don't want to stop creating work- my aim is to ultimately find a balance between the two. During the build up to my final major show at university i want to explore the different avenues available to me.