No one ever really mentions how difficult it is to hang up art for an opening. I was at The Assembly gallery for a good three hours today and managed to get only four incredibly precisely placed screws in total into the wall.
I entered this juried show by handing in a computer printout of what I wanted to hang. In this case, it was a group of 12 panels that all interconnect in any way that you wanted. Being lazy and a little crafty, I took a picture of only one of the panels and made a fake composition on a stock image of a wall I have for just such an occasion:
The very laughable thing-
and what I didn't figure out until trying to put together and hang up the piece is that I cannot make this composition given the panels I've painted using a design created by folding paper- it needs eight panels of one design and four panels of the opposite design; I had six and six.
This in itself would have been very embarrassing, if not for the fact that the hanging space was only nine feet tall, and the composition on the printout needs ten feet, so I needed to figure out an entirely new composition anyways.
This took a little time, but I came up with a killer composition that will be at the very least ten times as hard to hang, since I'm now hanging on the diamond, instead of, well, how you usually hang a painting. Think Piet Mondrian.
I did, since I saw a somewhat lacking (for twelve bones, somewhat lacking) show featuring De Stijl artists, at the SAM on the third. My Seattle trip is a story itself, which makes about four road trips I have taken in about a years time (Richmond Indiana, Ventura California, New Orleans Louisiana, Seattle Washington or even San Fransico a little earlier) that I haven't written in much length here. I always thought I would write prolix tomes about them, but I guess it's not time yet.
I'll find my way.
Here's something like what will be hung up
This time, it's done with physical objects on the floor, before being hung. A very necessary last step if you're designing on a computer.
It's very nice to actually hang something that's better than what you're submitted, although time is somewhat of a precious thing to me, I'm graduating in four weeks.
I found out today that my contact at the gallery was someone I met at the Denver Art Expo, which I helped the Andenken Gallery hang up and take down - and also was in. He was in very bad shape, completely tied in a wheelchair. I found out he had just recovered from a motorcycle accident where his leg was torn off. They were able to successfully attach it again. He can move three out of five toes. That's a good bar for success and I guess that's just about what we can all hope for:
three out of five toes.
Leave a comment