S&S W6 Ways to exhibit

This week a lot of the art academies in the Netherlands had there launch exhibitions and I went to two of them. My goal was to look for diversity, new ways and things that I was attracted to.

I love it when pictures are just on the wall, clear and clean as long the images are really good. But when not, I appreciate it when it is made into a total design.

The focus is not just on the outcome but also on how it is made. Experiments, self made machines and labs where insects live.

For the content; I saw a lot done with nature, new flues, bacteria, flowers, environment and labs: the future. The eco-documentaries were still there but not as much as a couple of years ago.

Most of the rooms were light. When working with projection or light the rooms were made darker. The image with the glas fascinaties me because I don't know how it is done. The one with the red tapestry didn’t work. We were supposed to climb over but with a dress or high heels you wouldn’t.

The images here are made of all kind of 3D ways to exhibit.

The glass plates were an intriguing object but no idea what I was supposed to see. The added text was not helping. The images in a circle were beautifully exhibited but I couldn’t see what was on them. When the walls around it would have been white that it would have worked. The overhead projector worked really well together with the archive maps. The printed flower being on the ground is nice, but what if people go walk on it? I love this kind of total installations as long as there is a context to the exhibited work.

Performances; it is hard to get a kind of performance thing. It asks a lot of commitment from the artist because he has to perform all the time. In the left image you see people being asked to make a future dish and in the left somebody live making the painting. This is both working when there are people who like to participate by taking a longer look.

Love the design from these pinhole camera's.

Just because the object is good-looking

I also went to gallery Zerk with the opening of an exhibition by Margriet Smulders. She makes images with flowers. In the gallery they were relative small but she did some big ones before. I saw one image that I liked and all the others were a bit too much for me, very rococo. https://www.margrietsmulders.nl. I spoke to her about her work. She told me, for example, that her work is almost always printed on debond behind Plexiglas. This is because the galleries want it this way. She had some smaller pictures that were in the frame. this was to first hear what people thought of it before she would make expensive prints of it. Nudes could be seen on those photos. Not every gallery appears to show nudes. I had never thought about that.

Margriet Smulders: The Hand that whirls the Water in the Pool

What is special is the way she creaties the photos. Andre Smits, who travers the world to portrait artist in their studio, made this image of her creating the photo. She has a big box filled with water, a mirror underneath often, the flowers and filters.

by André Smits

The link to the project of André Smit: https://www.artistintheworld.com/index.htm

You can click on the names of the artist to see one of the, at this moment, 4777 photos.

Books to be walls

Stephan Vanfleteren ones used the book (lead cover) as the walls for his images. The project was about decline showing vitrines (12 years of photography). The idea was that people who bought the book could take it home immediately and that way the decline was visible in the exhibition itself. The 666 books were sold out in two days and they had to change plans otherwise there wouldn't have been an exhibition left. 

Thoughts:

The place where the images are shown can really resonate with the space but although really thought out on forehand it doesn’t always work. What people do, think or react to your work is not always predicted. As soon as you sent it away it will have a bit of a live on its own. It is like having raised a child that leaves the house to have its own live.

I made this visual as an example of a way of exhibiting my work. The place I choose, Den Brielle, is a fortified city that survived ages. This place is famous for the fact that on the 1ste of April 1571 it was won back from Spain. Something that is still celebrated every year in the form of a street theatre kind of parade. It is sometimes assumed that April 1 foolsday has their origins there, but it seem to have existed before time.

Why this city? It is strange to realize that this old city that survived wars and is so important in the Dutch history will disappear according to the predictions.

Another fortified city, Naarden is the home of a photofestival every other year.

The problem was that my images were rather small. To have them bigger I rendered the images again (27 hours each) and I also tried to print them bigger to see how it looks.Using my sons laptop gives better, sharper results and is is faster as well. Happens that the rendering is done on the CPU and my computer has 2.2GHZ and his has 4.1; a big difference.