Week 3 Gallery Expirence

Gallery Experience

The day started with a tour of the Talbot Rice Gallery with James Clegg, first I learned that it is a historic and protected building and James said that from a curatorial point of view it gives the curator a lot of ideas to think about the work and it is interesting to have the work in such a unique architectural room. In the gallery, what you need to think about as a curator is where to put the artwork, we need to think about how to protect the artwork that we have, so any fragile, delicate work should be avoided under the windows.

Secondly, moving into the next space, one question that I think is well worth thinking about for curators is where will your audience rest? Where in the tour can they take time out? I think it requires the curator to analyse and cut up the space available and to make the appropriate connections between the various parts of the exhibition, and James has placed a small sofa in this very nice little room. It’s a transition, I think, from a very bright, echoey space to this slightly darker room. The walls here are grey, which is also suggestive of a different type of atmosphere. What I sensed was that each area of the exhibition required careful curatorial consideration. At the back of this area is a fire escape, so for safety reasons there are no objects or even artworks to prevent people from leaving the building easily.

Next, we come to an area with a low ceiling, where films are shown on a large screen. The low ceiling was very useful as it hid some wires so that the audience could watch the two projectors at the back without the obvious wires, which made it look very neat. This reminds me of the Chinese phrase “to adapt to the local conditions”, which means to develop appropriate measures according to the actual conditions of different areas. This way, the advantages of each area are maximised.

These are my feelings and brief reflections after visiting Talbot Rice Gallery.

Extra Video Lecture Online

Julie presented some examples of curation through an online lecture.

I was impressed by the collective project “Breaking Bread”. I visited their website, which is a hands-on project that considers the relationship between family and community through sharing food. Through Julie’s presentation, I learnt that the project is a collaborative effort between many students who engage and interact with the wider public. The whole project is divided into three parts, TEA AND EMPATHY, BREAKING BREAD EXHIBITION and FOOD STORIES. They are working on different themes in the food sector. What struck me about this project was that ‘Breaking Bread’ was a broad title, a project that made me want to go deeper as soon as I heard the name. So it will be the task of the class to come up with a general and meaningful title for our group exhibition.

The exhibition of Australian artist Brooke Andrew’s Wanderer’s Grave also appealed to me. Brooke went about organising these exhibits as a curator, essentially to challenge official history, to tell other histories and to expose them. I could see that there were very different types of work on display in this one space, such as photography, installations, light work and so on. This has inspired me to think about how to put these different elements together, or to make an effective connection, once I have decided on the theme of the exhibition, and that the artworks I show can be diverse and different.